Optical quantification of nanoscale structural alterations in pups' brain cells due to fetal alcoholism using dual spectroscopy

摘要

The quantitative measurement of nanoscale structural alterations in cells/tissues is important to understand their physical states. Molecular specific light localization technique and microscopic imaging are highly sensitive spectroscopic approaches for studying the structural abnormalities in brain cells under a sedative condition. Fetal alcohol syndrome and other neurological disorders are the severe, irreversible outcomes of fetal alcoholism. The alcohol consumed by a pregnant mother passes through the placenta to the growing womb and inhibits the growth of vital organs of the baby resulting in brain damage and other birth defects. This damage is initially at the nanoscale level in cells/tissue. We probe fetal alcoholic pup brain cells using dual spectroscopy approaches: 1) photonics localization method using inverse participation ratio via confocal imaging, confocal-IPR, to probe DNA and histone molecular spatial structural alterations; 2) a recently developed spectroscopic technique, partial wave spectroscopy (PWS), which combines mesoscopic physics with microscopic imaging and detects the nano to submicron scales alterations in pup's brain cells/tissues. The molecular structural abnormalities calculated based on light localization properties show an increase in the degree of spatial molecular structural disorder in DNA and a decrease in histone. An increase in spatial disorder in DNA may suggest DNA unwinding while reduced structural disorder in histone may indicate the release of histone from the DNA and helps in the unwinding of the DNA and gene expression. This result is further supported by the PWS result which shows an increase in the degree of structural disorder in chronic alcohol-treated mice pup's brain tissues.