Wave front engineering for microscopy of living cells.

Valentina Emiliani (1) , Dan Cojoc (2) , Enrico Ferrari (2) , Valeria Garbin (2) , Christiane Durieux (1) , Maite Coppey-Moisan (1) , Enzo Di Fabrizio (2)

1 IJM (UMR_7592) - Institut Jacques Monod
2 Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia

A new method to perform simultaneously three dimensional optical sectioning and optical manipulation is presented. The system combines a multi trap optical tweezers with a video microscope to enable axial scanning of living cells while maintaining the trapping configuration at a fixed position. This is achieved compensating the axial movement of the objective by shaping the wave front of the trapping beam with properly diffractive optical elements displayed on a computer controlled spatial light modulator. Our method has been validated in three different experimental configurations. In the first, we decouple the position of a trapping plane from the axial movements of the objective and perform optical sectioning of a circle of beads kept on a fixed plane. In a second experiment, we extend the method to living cell microscopy by showing that mechanical constraints can be applied on the dorsal surface of a cell whilst performing its fluorescence optical sectioning. In the third experiment, we trapped beads in a three dimensional geometry and perform, always through the same objective, an axial scan of the volume delimited by the beads.

Mots clés: cell imaging; optical tweezers; method; video microscope

Domaines: Autre [q-bio.OT]

Valentina Emiliani, Dan Cojoc, Enrico Ferrari, Valeria Garbin, Christiane Durieux, et al.. Wave front engineering for microscopy of living cells.. Optics Express, 2005, 13, pp.1395-1405. ⟨hal-00014507⟩