Study of cell-biosubstrate contacts via surface plasmon polariton phase microscopy

This study utilized a developed surface plasmon polariton (SPP) phase microscopy to observe cell-biosubstrate contacts. The developed SPP phase microscopy is highly sensitive to cell membrane contact with biosubstrates and also provides long-term phase stability to achieve time-lapse living cell observation. As such, an SPP intensity and phase sensitivity comparison demonstrates that the sensitivity of the phase measurement can be 100-fold greater than that of the intensity measurement. Also, a more than 2-hour cell apoptosis observation via the SPP phase microscopy is presented. To implement the incident angle from 70° to 78°, cell-biosubstrate contact images corresponding to the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) angles are obtained by utilizing the SPP phase measurement. According to the information of the corresponding SPR angle image and a multilayer simulation, the contact distances between a living melanoma cell and a bovine serum albumin substrate at four different locations have been estimated.