Bogdanov Georgii, Chatterjee Atrouli, Makeeva Nataliya, Farrukh Aleeza, Gorodetsky Alon A
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
iScience. 2023 May 11;26(7):106854. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106854. eCollection 2023 Jul 21.
Cephalopods (e.g., squids, octopuses, and cuttlefishes) possess remarkable dynamic camouflage abilities and therefore have emerged as powerful sources of inspiration for the engineering of dynamic optical technologies. Within this context, we have focused on the development of engineered living systems that can emulate the tunable optical characteristics of some squid skin cells. Herein, we expand our ability to controllably incorporate reflectin-based structures within mammalian cells via genetic engineering methods, and demonstrate that such structures can facilitate holotomographic and standard microscopy imaging of the cells. Moreover, we show that the reflectin-based structures within our cells can be reconfigured with a straightforward chemical stimulus, and we quantify the stimulus-induced changes observed for the structures at the single cell level. The reported findings may enable a better understanding of the color- and appearance-changing capabilities of some cephalopod skin cells and could afford opportunities for reflectins as molecular probes in the fields of cell biology and biomedical optics.
头足类动物（如鱿鱼、章鱼和乌贼）具有卓越的动态伪装能力，因此已成为动态光学技术工程的强大灵感来源。在此背景下，我们专注于开发能够模拟某些鱿鱼皮肤细胞可调光学特性的工程化生命系统。在此，我们通过基因工程方法扩展了在哺乳动物细胞中可控地整合基于反射蛋白的结构的能力，并证明此类结构可促进细胞的全息断层成像和标准显微镜成像。此外，我们表明细胞内基于反射蛋白的结构可以通过简单的化学刺激进行重新配置，并且我们在单细胞水平上对结构的刺激诱导变化进行了量化。所报道的发现可能有助于更好地理解某些头足类动物皮肤细胞的颜色和外观变化能力，并可能为反射蛋白在细胞生物学和生物医学光学领域作为分子探针提供机会。
