The ability to track individual cells in space over time is crucial to analyzing heterogeneous cell populations.Recently,microlaser particles have emerged as unique optical probes for massively multiplexed single-cell...The ability to track individual cells in space over time is crucial to analyzing heterogeneous cell populations.Recently,microlaser particles have emerged as unique optical probes for massively multiplexed single-cell tagging.However,the microlaser far-field emission is inherently direction-dependent,which causes strong intensity fluctuations when the orientation of the particle varies randomly inside cells.Here,we demonstrate a general solution based on the incorporation of nanoscale light scatterers into microlasers.Two schemes are developed by introducing either boundary defects or a scattering layer into microdisk lasers.The resulting laser output is omnidirectional,with the minimum-to-maximum ratio of the angle-dependent intensity improving from 0.007(-24 dB)to>0.23(-6dB).After transfer into live cells in vitro,the omnidirectional laser particles within moving cells could be tracked continuously with high signal-to-noise ratios for 2 h,while conventional microlasers exhibited frequent signal loss causing tracking failure.展开更多
基金supported by the National Key R&D Program of China(2018YFB1107200)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)(Grants 62075084,61522504,61420106014,11734012,and 11574218)+3 种基金the Guangdong Provincial Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project(Grant 2016ZT06D081)the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation(2020A1515010615)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(21620415)the China Scholarship Council(201906785011).
文摘The ability to track individual cells in space over time is crucial to analyzing heterogeneous cell populations.Recently,microlaser particles have emerged as unique optical probes for massively multiplexed single-cell tagging.However,the microlaser far-field emission is inherently direction-dependent,which causes strong intensity fluctuations when the orientation of the particle varies randomly inside cells.Here,we demonstrate a general solution based on the incorporation of nanoscale light scatterers into microlasers.Two schemes are developed by introducing either boundary defects or a scattering layer into microdisk lasers.The resulting laser output is omnidirectional,with the minimum-to-maximum ratio of the angle-dependent intensity improving from 0.007(-24 dB)to>0.23(-6dB).After transfer into live cells in vitro,the omnidirectional laser particles within moving cells could be tracked continuously with high signal-to-noise ratios for 2 h,while conventional microlasers exhibited frequent signal loss causing tracking failure.
