Intracellular Thermal Sensor for Single Cell Analysis -Short review

Abstract

Temperature is a key environmental variable that affects almost all natural and engineered systems from the system level down to the molecular level. The first attempt to measure temperature goes back to 1592 when Galileo Galilei tried to develop a thermometer. Since then having accurate temperature measurements has been a challenging research topic. Recently, in single cell analysis, internal temperature and heat generation inside a living cell has proven to have important roles in the survival of cells, controls many cellular activities for instance; cell division and gene expression. Moreover, cancerous cells are identified with excessive heat production. Studies have been done by researchers from different fields in the attempt to develop sensors that can accurately report the temperature inside living cells. This short review presents the most recent developments in nanoscale thermometry for biological applications, highlighting the recent advances in the near field and the far field methods. The far field thermometry cover sensors that depend on the luminescence’s of the material, for example: quantum dots, nanoparticles, and fluorescents based compounds. While, near field thermometry is based on different principles depending on the sensing mechanism used. Some of the examples mentioned are thermocouple thermometry, RNA thermometry, resonant thermometry, photoacoustic thermometry and carbon nanotubes thermometry.

Review—Intracellular Sensors Based on Carbonaceous Nanomaterials: A Review

“…Carbon nanomaterials have attracted increasing interest in monitoring intracellular temperature because of their fascinating biocompatibility and chemical inertness. 49,109,110 Kumawat et al 58 have synthesized a graphene quantum dots using ethanolic extracts of mangifera indica (mango) leaves with excitation-independent near-infrared (NIR)fluorescence emission. The graphene quantum dots have intracellular temperature sensing properties and have been used to analyze intracellular temperature (25 °C-45 °C) of live L929 cells (Fig.…”

Ultra-sensitive hybrid diamond nanothermometer

“…Being a non-contact and convenient method, optical-based nanothermometers, like fluorescence proteins [ 11 ], dyes [ 7 ] and rare-earth nanoparticles [ 12 ], have been proposed and demonstrated for temperature detection under various conditions. However, this method has a relatively low sensitivity (typically \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$1\,\,{\rm{K\,\,H}}{{\rm{z}}^{ - 1/2}}$\end{document} ) [ 13 – 15 ], and some optical sensors are subject to artifacts induced by the local environments of the sensors, such as refractive indices and pH values [ 16 ]. Electronic temperature measurements, such as scanning thermal microscopy and superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID), have high spatial resolution and high sensitivity ( \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$\sim 1{\rm{\,\,\mu K\,\,H}}{{\rm{z}}^{ - 1/2}}$\end{document} ) [ 17 , 18 ], but they require extreme operating conditions and are subject to contact-related artifacts.…”