Work is presently under way at NPL to characterise the optical properties of both single and few cells, with the aim of using these properties as natural bio-markers, indicating cell health.

Fixed fiberblast cells imaged in a T-flask using OCT

This work has remarkable potential for visualising cell function in real time by generating real-time protein maps. Such visualisation is important in regenerative medicine where the ability to non-invasively monitor large tissue cultures at the single cell level is an important step for scaling up tissue engineering techniques to make them commercially viable.

NPL has developed a Full Field Optical Coherence Tomography instrument that uses a broadband halogen lamp to obtain high axial resolution and high numerical aperture optics to achieve high resolution in the lateral dimension. A CCD camera replaces the standard single photo-detector, enabling the simultaneous capture of en face data at each axial position. The broadband source is extremely useful for monitoring spectral variations in optical properties over a large bandwidth, that can reveal useful functional information.