Study of acetowhitening mechanisms in live mammalian cells with label-free subcellular-level multimodal nonlinear optical microscopy

摘要

The tissue acetowhitening effect in acetic acid instillation procedure is a simple and economic method for neoplasia detection and has been clinically utilized since 1925. It is suspected that the optical property (e.g. scattering) change in acetowhitening is due to coagulation of intracellular proteins, but no experimental proof has been reported yet. In this work, we use third-harmonic generation (THG) and two-photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) to investigate the acetowhitening phenomenon induced by acidic acid in live mammalian cells without labeling. We studied the acetowhitening effect with different acetic acid concentrations and the co-localized TPEF and THG imaging on tryptophan and NADH at subcellular-level reveals that the acetowhitening phenomenon is highly related with proteins involved in metabolic pathways in the nucleus and cytoplasm in live cells.