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* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, City University of New York, Hunter College, New York, New York; and
Centre for Biospectroscopy and School of Chemistry, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Max Diem, Hunter College, CUNY, Dept. of Chemistry, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10021. Tel.: 212-772-5359; E-mail: mdiem{at}hunter.cuny.edu.
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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Similar sensitivity of IR-MSP has been demonstrated in the identification and classification of bacteria, where it is possible to reliably identify bacterial microcultures to the strain level (Maquelin et al., 2002
). This method has being used, for example, in hospitals in France to monitor outbreaks of bacteria-caused diseases (Sockalingum et al., 2004
), and to identify benign and pathogenic bacterial strains in the dairy product industry in Germany (Kümmerle et al., 1998
).
The use of IR-MSP to distinguish individual benign from malignant exfoliated cells has not yet been successful, although it was first attempted as early as the mid-1990s. These early attempts were aimed at creating a spectroscopic Papanicolaou (Pap) test for exfoliated cells from the human cervix (Wong et al., 1991
) to increase the low predictive value of present cytological methods. Early attempts used macroscopic measurements of sample pellets containing thousands of cervical cells. However, due to uncontrollable heterogeneity of the sample, and a poor understanding of the underlying cell spectroscopic principles, the results to date have been spurious, and the correlation against an unreliable gold-standard has been fortuitous (Wong et al., 1991
; Sindhuphak et al., 2003
).
We have initiated the ground work for the understanding of the spectroscopic properties of single dried or living human cells by studying cultured human and animal cells as a function of typical parameters which are known to influence cell development (Boydston-White et al., 1999
; Pacifico et al., 2003
; Diem et al., 2002
, 2004a
; Lasch et al., 2002b
; Miljkovi
et al., 2004
). Early in this work, we realized that human cells exhibit spectral behavior that appears to contradict the Beer-Lambert law (Diem et al., 1999
). In particular, we found that the DNA signals in pyknotic nuclei cannot be observed. Pyknosis is the shrinkage of inactive nuclei due to increased condensation of DNA.
Furthermore, very atypical spectra were observed for certain cells, apparently related to the cell division (Boydston-White et al., 1999
; Holman et al., 2000
). The most unusual of these spectra, reported by Holman and co-workers and confirmed by us (Diem et al., 2004a
), have not been explained hitherto. In this article, we present the framework for the spectral properties that do not follow Beer-Lambert's law, and those that result from light scattering effects.
| EXPERIMENTAL METHODS |
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| RESULTS AND DISCUSSION |
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1650 cm1) from a nucleus are between 0.2 and 0.4 absorbance units.
DNA signals in the nucleus are manifested by bands at
1235 and
1085 cm1 due to the antisymmetric and symmetric stretching modes of the
moieties of DNA, respectively. An unambiguous assignment of these peaks to DNA in human tissue (Chiriboga et al., 2000
) and cells (Lasch et al., 2002a
) was established by selectively removing the DNA from the sample by digestion via the enzyme DNase, and correlating the disappearance of these peaks to the digestion. In active cells, the
stretching peaks of DNA may exhibit an amplitude of 0.05 absorbance units; the equally strong DNA peaks in the double-bond stretching regions cannot be observed directly since they overlap the amide I protein band.
However, we found that cells that are terminally differentiated and metabolically inactive often show no DNA signals in the nucleus at all. This was first observed for superficial cervical cells (Diem et al., 2002
) and verified for oral mucosa cells (Lasch et al., 2002a
). These cell types are similar in that they are classified as squamous epithelial cells. In squamous tissue, a basal layer of actively dividing cells,
0.10.2 mm below the surface, produce daughter cells that migrate to the surface. In this maturation process, the cells enlarge and become stratified (flattened). When these cells reach the surface of the tissue, they eventually die and are lost from the surface.
Although they are at the surface, their main task is to protect the underlying tissue; thus, they become inactive. These inactive cells can no longer divide, and their protein synthesis is at a minimal level. Therefore, the nuclei shrink to
58 µm in diameter. This state is referred to as a pyknotic, or completely inactive, nucleus. Pyknotic nuclei can be identified microscopically by their small size, and characteristic morphology. However, although these nuclei are no longer transcribing or duplicating their DNA, they still have the entire genome in a very condensed state.
A micrograph of an oral mucosa cell with a pyknotic nucleus is shown in Fig. 1 A, and corresponding IR spectra in Fig. 1 B. The similarity between cytoplasmic and nuclear spectra shown in Fig. 1 B, traces a and b, demonstrates that, indeed, the DNA is virtually invisible, whereas the DNA from the nucleus of an active cell, shown in trace c, is clearly observable.
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![]() | (1) |
![]() | (2) |
Using the molar extinction coefficient
for a carbonyl group (Xiang et al., 1993
),
![]() | (3) |
![]() | (4) |
![]() | (5) |
Here, l is the path the light beam travels through the sample, and may be approximated by the diameter of the nucleus. This estimate assumes that the DNA is uniformly distributed in the nucleus, which is clearly not the case (see below).
Model IR spectroscopic studies on B-form DNA in vitro have demonstrated that the molar extinction coefficient for the symmetric and antisymmetric phosphodiester vibrations, at 1080 and 1235 cm1, respectively, are similar to that of the carbonyl stretching vibrations (Wang and Keiderling, 1993
). Thus, signal intensities similar to that in the carbonyl stretching region should be observed in the phosphodiester stretching vibrations.
However, the DNA is not distributed uniformly throughout the nucleus; rather, it is tightly wrapped around the histones to form chromatin. In chromatin, the DNA is extremely compact: depending on the degree of association (which depends on a cell's biological activity), the resulting structures may have a diameter between 30 and 800 nm. Assuming, for simplicity, that the DNA is packed into one spherical chromatin particle with a 500-nm diameter (with the same number of DNA basepairs), the concentration of carbonyl groups would increase 1000-fold, and the optical density 100-fold, since the pathlength decreases 10-fold:
![]() | (6) |
One would expect that virtually no photons are transmitted within the strong absorption bands of DNA and proteins (which make up the chromatin) by particles of such high optical density. Furthermore, given the number of transitions and the width of the DNA and protein bands, the entire highly condensed chromatin would be virtually opaque. Thus, very little or no information on the condensed chromatin is contained in the infrared spectrum of a compact (pyknotic) nucleus. We have referred to the absence of DNA signals in pyknotic nuclei as dark DNA.
However, such highly condensed particles will exhibit large light scattering cross-sections. We have shown recently for mitotic cells that the strongest Raman signals are, indeed, observed for the most highly condensed chromatin (for example, in the metaphase and anaphase of mitosis; Diem et al., 2004b
). Raman signals of the DNA of metabolically active, but nondividing cells, are quite weak.
Mie scattering from the entire nucleus, to be discussed in Light Scattering of Cells and Cellular Components, below, is expected to occur when the size of the nucleus is about the same as the wavelength of light, or in the infrared region of the spectrum. Elastic scattering of highly condensed, and much smaller chromatin particles, occurs at much lower wavelengths, and will not be discussed here.
Further evidence for dark DNA has been reported by a number of researchers. We found that avian erythrocytes (which contain inactive nuclei) and human erythrocytes (which are anucleated) exhibit virtually identical IR spectra (Fig. 2). Furthermore, Jamin et al. (2003)
reported a large increase in the DNA signals of apoptotic cells. In apoptosis, DNA is degraded into oligonucleotides with a few hundreds of basepairs that subsequently diffuse out of the nucleus. The accumulation of these oligonucleotides was observed in high spatial resolution, high quality synchrotron FTIR microspectroscopic data. This observation suggests that the DNA, although highly condensed in the nucleus, is unobservable, yet its degradation products are readily detected by IR microspectroscopy.
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2400 cm1 between the amide I and the C-H stretching region, which occurs only in the nuclear spectrum. We attribute this feature to Mie-type scattering of the nucleus, to be discussed next.
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The Mie scattering formalism can be approximated (Walstra, 1964
) by the equation
![]() | (7) |
![]() | (8) |
the wavelength of the light. This set of equations, first derived by Walstra (1964)
6000 cm1. The pure scattering spectrum, calculated for a nuclear radius of 4.2 µm, is shown in Fig. 5 (top trace). Based on an approximate size of the nucleus (r
4.5 ± 0.5 µm, judged by the selected aperture), we may estimate the refractive index of the nucleus to be on the order of 1.3 in the mid-to-near IR spectral region.
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| CONCLUSIONS |
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The nonlinear absorption observed for very compact nuclei suggests that nucleic acid features may be used as an indicator for a cell's level of activity: we have shown for many normal and cancerous cells, and cells at different stages of the cell cycle, that the level of nucleic acid signals can be related to the level of DNA condensation and, in turn, to the proliferation and activity level of a cell (Lasch et al., 2002; Miljkovi
et al., 2004
; Boydston-White et al., 2005
). Similarly, the appearance of DNA signals from the cytoplasm of cells in late apoptosis (Jamin et al., 2003
) indicates that after breakdown of nuclear DNA, and diffusion of DNA fragments into the cytoplasm, their signals become detectable in IR microspectroscopy.
These unusual spectra effects observed for individual cells, and the resulting heterogeneity of cellular spectra, need to be firmly understood before IR microspectroscopy can be utilized as a diagnostic indicator of disease.
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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Submitted on December 14, 2004; accepted for publication February 18, 2005.
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