Laser particles with omnidirectional emission for cell tracking

• 作者: Shui-Jing Tang Paul H.Dannenberg Andreas C.Liapis Nicola Martino Yue Zhuo Yun-Feng Xiao Seok-Hyun Yun
• 来源期刊: 光：科学与应用（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（2）
• 所属期刊栏目: Articles
• 页码范围: 197-207
• 页数: 11页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

The ability to track individual cells in space over time is crucial to analyzing heterogeneous cell populations. Recently, microlaser particles have emerged as unique optical probes for massively multiplexed single-cell tagging. However, the microlaser far-field emission is inherently direction-dependent, which causes strong intensity fluctuations when the orientation of the particle varies randomly inside cells. Here, we demonstrate a general solution based on the incorporation of nanoscale light scatterers into microlasers. Two schemes are developed by introducing either boundary defects or a scattering layer into microdisk lasers. The resulting laser output is omnidirectional, with the minimum-to-maximum ratio of the angle-dependent intensity improving from 0.007 (?24 dB) to>0.23 (?6 dB). After transfer into live cells in vitro, the omnidirectional laser particles within moving cells could be tracked continuously with high signal-to-noise ratios for 2 h, while conventional microlasers exhibited frequent signal loss causing tracking failure.