NONLINEAR SPECTRAL IMAGING OF ELASTIC CARTILAGE IN RABBIT EARS

摘要

Elastic cartilage in the rabbit external ear is an important animal model with attractive potential value for researching the physiological and pathological states of cartilages especially during wound healing.In this work,nonlinear optical microscopy based on two-photon excited fluor-escence and second harmonic generation were employed for imaging and quantifying the intact elastic cartilage.The morphology and distribution of main components in elastic carti lage incuding cartilage cells,collagen and elastic fibers were clearly observed from the high-resolution two-di mensional nonlinear optical images.The areas of cell nuclei,a parameter related to the pathological changes of nornal or abnormal elastic cartilage,can be easily quantifed.Moreover,the three-dimensional structure of chondrocytes and matrix were displayed by constructing threedimensional image of cartilage tissue.At last,the enmission spectra from cartilage were obtained and analyzed.We found that the different ratio of collagen over elastic fibens can be used to locate the observed position in the elastic cartilage.The redox ratio based on the ratio of nicotinamide adenine dimucleotide(NADH)over flavin adenine dinucleotide(FAD)fuorescence can also be calculated to analyze the metabolic state of chondrocytes in different regions.Our results demonstrated that this technique has the potential to provide more accurate and comprehensive information for the physiological states of elastic cartilage.