Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei230026, China.
Department of Applied Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei230026, China.
Nano Lett. 2023 Jan 25;23(2):558-566. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c04018. Epub 2023 Jan 3.
Measurement of electron transfer at the single-particle or -cell level is crucial to the study of basic chemical and biological processes. However, it remains challenging to directly probe the microbial extracellular electron transfer process due to the weakness of signals and the lack of techniques. Here, we present a label-free and noninvasive imaging method that is able to measure the electron transfer in microbial cells. We measured the extracellular electron transfer processes by imaging the redox reaction of -type outer membrane cytochromes in microbial cells using a plasmonic imaging technique, and obtained the electrochemical activity parameters (formal potential and number of electrons transferred) of multiple individual microbial cells, allowing for unveiling ample heterogeneities in electron transfer at the single-cell level. We anticipate that this method will contribute to the study of electron transfer in various biological and chemical processes.
在单细胞或单颗粒水平上测量电子转移对于研究基本的化学和生物过程至关重要。然而，由于信号较弱且缺乏技术，直接探测微生物细胞外电子转移过程仍然具有挑战性。在这里，我们提出了一种无标记和非侵入性的成像方法，能够测量微生物细胞中的电子转移。我们通过使用等离子体成像技术来测量微生物细胞中 - 型外膜细胞色素的氧化还原反应来测量细胞外电子转移过程，并获得多个单个微生物细胞的电化学活性参数（形式电势和转移电子数），从而揭示出单细胞水平上电子转移的大量异质性。我们预计这种方法将有助于研究各种生物和化学过程中的电子转移。
