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

Abstract

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.