Multimodal Nanoscale Chemical Imaging of Intra- and Inter-Cellular Biomolecules Involved in Microbial Interactions
EMSL Project ID
49643
Abstract
Microbes orchestrate a suite of intra- and inter-cellular biomolecules to carry out diverse metabolic processes. Existing genomic and biochemical methods cannot directly probe the physical connections involved in such processes over the relevant length scales, spanning the nano-meso-micrometer spatial regimes. Determining the location and function of such biomolecules would aid in identifying the mechanisms governing microbial interactions. Furthermore, the chemical identities of the components driving the flow of materials in complex microbial communities are largely unknown. We will address these technical and conceptual gaps by developing an innovative single transferable multimodal chemical imaging platform, Chemical Nanoscope, that can interrogate biomolecules in living systems using three complementary label-free, nanoscale, ultrasensitive chemical imaging techniques:1. Infrared scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy (IR s-SNOM)
2. Tip-enhanced Raman nano-spectroscopy (TERS)
3. Tip-enhanced UV-Vis-Near-IR optical absorption nano-spectroscopy (TAN).
This unique atomic force microscopy (AFM) -based instrument will be used to investigate a wide range of biomolecules (nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, polysaccharides, biological chromophores) through their characteristic electronic (TAN) and vibrational (IR s-SNOM and TERS) signatures, over the nano-meso-micrometer length scales. Our platform will not only enable recording chemical images of single microbial cells with subcellular resolution (~10 nm), but it will also enable mapping an entire microbial community, or “microbiome”, (~100s of microns) with chemical selectivity.
Project Details
Start Date
2016-10-06
End Date
2017-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members
Related Publications
Nanoscale Chemical Reaction Imaging at the Solid–Liquid Interface via TERS
Bhattarai A., and P.Z. El-Khoury. 2019. "Nanoscale Chemical Reaction Imaging at the Solid-Liquid Interface via TERS." Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 10, no. 11:2817-2822. PNNL-SA-141439. doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.9b00935
Multimodal hyperspectral optical microscopy
Novikova IV, CR Smallwood, Y Gong, D Hu, L Hendricks, JE Evans, A Bhattarai, WP Hess, and PZ El-Khoury. 2017. "Multimodal Hyperspectral Optical Microscopy." Chemical Physics 498-499:25-32. doi:10.1016/j.chemphys.2017.08.011
Imaging localized electric fields with nanometer precision through tip-enhanced Raman scattering
Bhattarai A ,El-Khoury P Z 2017. "Imaging Localized Electric Fields with Nanometer Precision through Tip-Enhanced Raman Scattering" Chemical Communications, DOI: 10.1039/c7cc02593a