Autofluorescence Anisotropy based investigation of cellular heterogeneity and metabolism

Autofluorescence-based optical imaging methods have advanced cellular metabolism research as a technique to non-invasively measure metabolic shifts temporally and spatially. In this work, we present metabolic investigations using fluorescence anisotropy in two well-defined plant and animal models: 1) A set of flavonoid-deficient Arabidopsis thaliana mutants which shows unique fluorescence polarization properties with varying degrees of flavonoid accumulation. 2) The cancer metabolic deformities manifested in animal cells using real-time fluorescence anisotropy based metabolic readout (4fps). These studies demonstrated the potential of using fluorescence anisotropy in a systematic way to study metabolism and cellular heterogeneity.