AVS 60th International Symposium and Exhibition
    Ions at Aqueous Interfaces Focus Topic Tuesday Sessions
       Session IA+BA-TuA

Paper IA+BA-TuA11
Order Matters – Detecting Non-Isotropic Structures in Complex Biological Samples

Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 5:20 pm, Room 201 B

Session: Ions and Biomolecules at Aqueous Interfaces
Presenter: P. Koelsch, University of Washington
Correspondent: Click to Email

Order is omnipresent in biological systems in various forms and on almost all length-scales. Here we discuss how to use order as a (label-free) contrast mechanism in microscopy or selectivity criteria in surface spectroscopy to detect and analyze non-isotropic arrangements in complex in vitro scenarios. Examples are fibrillar structures that can be visualized within tissue via second-harmonic-generation (SHG) microscopy or detected on surfaces via vibrational sum-frequency-generation (SFG) spectroscopy. The contrast mechanism in SHG microscopy is order and similarly is order (and chirality) the selectivity criteria when is comes to SFG spectroscopic measurements on surfaces. Examples to be discussed are fibrillar arrangements within the extracellular matrix of adherent cells on substrates or within cancerous tissue samples.