Calibrated brightfield‐based imaging for measuring intracellular protein concentration

Intracellular protein concentration is an essential cell characteristic, which manifests itself through the refractive index. The latter can be measured from two or more mutually defocused brightfield images analyzed using the TIE (transport-of-intensity equation). In practice, however, TIE does not always achieve quantitatively accurate results on biological cells. Therefore, we have developed a calibration procedure that involves successive imaging of cells in solutions containing different amounts of added protein. This allows one to directly relate the output of TIE (T) to intracellular protein concentration C (g/L). The resultant relationship has a simple form: C ≈ 1.0(T/V), where V is the cell volume (μm3) and 1.0 is an empirical coefficient. We used calibrated TIE imaging to characterize the regulatory volume increase (RVI) in adherent HeLa cells placed in a hyperosmotic solution. We found that while no RVI occurs over the first 30–60 min, the protein concentration fully recovers after 20 h. Because interpretation of such long experiments may depend on whether protein concentration varies significantly throughout the cell cycle, we measured this parameter in three cell lines: HeLa, MDCK and DU145. Our data indicate that protein concentration remains relatively stable in these cells. © 2017 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry