Lipid droplets as endogenous intracellular microlenses

With the demand in real-time monitoring of endoplasmic variations and rapid detection of extracellular signals, a great number of approaches to bioimaging have been developed. The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic progress in optical imaging, especially with the emerging of microsphere-assisted techniques that have the excellent ability of signal collection and enable real-time and super-resolution imaging with conventional optical microscopic systems. However, as most of the microspheres in current strategies are in solid and artificially synthetic materials, they are of very low biocompatibility. Fortunately, lessons from nature have shown that some bio-components and already-existing objects can interact with light and are able to take the same functions as the real optical elements.

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