JPK Instruments' has revealed details of its Nanotracker nano-optics platform for applying optical tweezers and 3D particle tracking.
The Nanotracker optical-tweezer and 3D particle-tracking system is a live cell imaging technique with high temporal and spatial resolution applied to non-labelled nanoparticles.
The user can trap and track particles from several um down to 30nm with the ability to control, manipulate and observe vesicles, endosomes, gene and drug spheres, viruses and bacteria, nanoprobes or carriers, biomarkers or even whole cells in real time with nanometre precision.
This is intended to open up applications in many disciplines including biophysics, biochemistry, cellular and medical research in microbiology, developmental and system biology, infection research and immune response, toxicity of nanoparticles and many more.
There are many potential application areas for applying an optical-tweezer platform.
These include the study of single molecules and biopolymers, cell membranes, cell-particle interaction and viral and bacterial infection.
Up until this time, the majority of optical-tweezer systems have been built by researchers for their own needs.
There are variants consisting of different laser setups, single or multiple optical traps and different optical detection techniques.
JPK's Nanotracker offers full integration into an inverted research microscope and complete environmental control of the sample.
In general, experiments require long-term system stability and this is achieved with the choice of an ultra-stable 1,064nm laser: a folded optical pathway in combination with a drift-compensated design.
Existing technologies such as epifluorescence, TIRF, LSM and video particle tracking have several drawbacks.
Labelling is time-consuming and causes perturbation in single-molecule experiments.
The best resolution in confocal microscopy (CLSM) is ~300nm in the X and Y and ~500nm in the Z axis.
Fluorescence is not label free and has poor performance for processes occurring on cell membranes.
TIRF measures only the first 200nm from the surface of the cell and gives no access to the whole cell volume.
Particle tracking by video microscopy is only a 2D technique with best resolution of 15nm.
