Label-free non-invasive subwavelength-resolution imaging using yeast cells as biological lenses

There is a growing interest to use live cells to replace the widely used non-biological microsphere lenses. In this work, we demonstrate the use of yeast cells for such imaging purpose. Using fiber-based optical trapping technique, we trap a chain of three yeast cells and bring them to the vicinity of imaging objects. These yeast cells work as near-field magnifying lenses and simultaneously pick up the sub-diffraction information of the nanoscale objects under each cell and project them into the far-field. The experimental results demonstrated that Blu-ray disc of 100 nm feature can be clearly resolved in a parallel manner by each cell. (c) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

The study demonstrated the use of yeast cells as imaging lenses, trapping and magnifying nanoscale objects using fiber-based optical trapping technique. Experimental results showed that yeast cells could clearly resolve 100 nm features on a Blu-ray disc.