Investigation of depth-resolved nanoscale structural changes in regulated cell proliferation and chromatin decondensation

We present depth-resolved spatial-domain low-coherence quantitative phase microscopy, a simple approach that utilizes coherence gating to construct a depth-resolved structural feature vector quantifying sub-resolution axial structural changes at different optical depths within the sample. We show that this feature vector is independent of sample thickness variation, and identifies nanoscale structural changes in clinically prepared samples. We present numerical simulations and experimental validation to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. We also perform experiments using unstained cells to investigate the nanoscale structural changes in regulated cell proliferation through cell cycle and chromatin decondensation induced by histone acetylation. (C) 2013 Optical Society of AmericaThis study was supported in part by National Cancer Institute (CA164433 and CA148644), the Broad Medical Research Program of The Broad Foundation, Magee-Women’s Foundation, James F. Walsh Foundation and National Institute of Health through UL1RR024153 and UL1TR000005.peer-reviewe