Check out Vera's Nature Protocols paper!

Integrating micro- and nanolasers into live cells, tissue cultures and small animals is one of our passions in the group and an emerging and rapidly evolving technique for noninvasive interrogation and labeling. The bright and distinct spectra of such lasers make this approach particularly attractive for high-throughput applications requiring single-cell specificity, such as multiplexed cell tracking and intracellular biosensing. However, implementation of these applications requires high-resolution and at the same time high-speed spectral readout, plus advanced analysis routines -- not an easy feat!

In our new paper we present a modular approach to this challenge. A first procedure shows how to efficiently integrate different types of lasers into living cells, and the second part presents a workflow for obtaining intracellular lasing spectra with high spectral resolution and up to 125-kHz readout rate and starts from the construction of a custom hyperspectral confocal microscope. We provide guidance on running hyperspectral imaging routines for various experimental designs and recommend specific workflows for processing the resulting large data sets along with an open-source Python library of functions covering the analysis pipeline. We illustrate three applications including the rapid, large-volume mapping of absolute refractive index by using polystyrene microbead lasers, the intracellular sensing of cardiac contractility with polystyrene microbead lasers and long-term cell tracking by using semiconductor nanodisk lasers. If all goes well, our sample preparation and imaging procedures require 2 days, and setting up the hyperspectral confocal microscope for microlaser characterization requires <2 weeks to complete for users with limited experience in optical and software engineering.

Find the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-023-00924-6