title: Near-field optical analysis of living cells in vitro.
abstract: Near-field optical analysis (NOA) provides morphological nanoscale mappings of living cells in liquid cell culture media and nondestructive insight into cell functionality. Here we show for the first time the performance of NOA in imaging living cells. Unlabeled human endothelial cells attached to polished titanium disks were analyzed with hydrophobically coated optical biosensors mounted to a near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM). Biosensors and titanium substrates could be simply implemented in standard NSOM and high-throughput NOA.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomaterials/ENSOMA-Laboratory, Central Institute of Biomedical Engineering University of Ulm, 89081 Ulm, Germany. samoan@gmx.net
authors.forename: Andrei P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Sommer
authors.forename: Ralf-Peter
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Franke
mesh_terms: D004727:Endothelium / Q000648:ultrastructure; D006801:Humans; D066298:In Vitro Techniques; D008853:Microscopy