Imaging of cell membrane topography using Tamm plasmon coupled emission

Imaging of the cell membrane topography is important for a clear understanding of various biological activities of cells. We propose a technique for imaging the cell membrane topography that uses a metal-photonic crystal structure instead of a glass-water interface used in conventional polarized total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (pTIRFM) techniques. Through the metal-photonic crystal of the proposed technique, the fluorophore labels on the cell membrane can be excited by both the p- and s-polarized excitation light, and in each case, the p- and s-polarized radiation from the excited fluorophores can be separated to form an image. We calculate the images of the cell membrane topography that is fusing a granule using the proposed technique and pTIRFM. The image obtained by the proposed technique shows a much greater contrast with respect to the background than that of the image obtained by pTIRFM. We also find that the structural similarity index of the image obtained by the proposed technique to a reference image is ~77%, which is only ~16% for the image obtained by pTIRFM. The proposed technique will help to obtain a clearer and more accurate image of the cell membrane topography, and hence, a deeper understanding of different biological activities.