Biofluidic Random Laser Cytometer for Biophysical Phenotyping of Cell Suspensions

Jijun He, Shuhuan Hu*, Jifeng Ren, Xin Cheng, Zhijia Hu, Ning Wang, Huangui Zhang, Raymond H.W. Lam, Hwa Yaw Tam

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Phenotypic profiling of single floating cells in liquid biopsies is the key to the era of precision medicine. A random laser in biofluids is a promising tool for the label-free characterization of the biophysical properties as a result of the high brightness and sharp peaks of the lasing spectra, yet previous reports were limited to the random laser in solid tissues with dense scattering. In this report, a random laser cytometer is demonstrated in an optofluidic device filled with gain medium and human breast normal/cancerous cells. The multiple lightscattering event induced by the microscale human cells promotes random lasing and influences the lasing properties in term of laser modes, spectral wavelengths, and lasing thresholds. A sensing strategy based on analyzing the lasing properties is developed to determine both the whole cell and the subcellular biophysical properties, and the malignant alterations of the cell suspensions are successfully detected. Our results provide a new approach to designing a label-free biophysical cytometer based on optofluidic random laser devices, which is advantageous for further research in the field of random laser bioapplication.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)832-840
Number of pages9
JournalACS Sensors
Volume4
Issue number4
Early online date11 Mar 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Apr 2019

Bibliographical note

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in ACS Sensors, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssensors.8b01188

Keywords

  • Optofluidics
  • biophysics
  • cancer cells
  • cell suspension
  • cytometer
  • phenotype
  • random laser

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