Endogenous and exogenous fluorescence emission from biological samples encodes complementary information. Endogenous fluorescence allows studying tissues with minimum disturbance and the absence of contrast agents makes it well suited for clinical translation, whereas the selective use of exogenous labels provides highly specific contrast of features of interest in biological tissue. We design and build instruments that can access both modalities for a variety of applications including vascular tissue engineering.
Funding
NIH (National Institutes of Health): R01HL121068, R03EB025565
CIRM (California Institute for Regenerative Medicine): RT3-07879
Publications
C. Li, A. Alfonso-Garcia, J. McMasters, J. Bec, B. Weyers, L. Uyesaka, L. Griffiths, A. Panitch, and L. Marcu, "Simultaneous intraluminal imaging of tissue autofluorescence and eGFP-labeled cells in engineered vascular grafts inside a bioreactor," Methods Appl Fluoresc 7, 044003 (2019).
A. Alfonso-Garcia, C. Li, J. Bec, D. Yankelevich, L. Marcu, and B. Sherlock, "Fiber-based platform for synchronous imaging of endogenous and exogenous fluorescence of biological tissue," Opt Lett 44, 3350-3353 (2019)