A fluorescence lifetime separation approach for FLIM live-cell imaging

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) translates the duration of excited states of fluorophores into lifetime information as an additional source of contrast in images of biological samples. This offers the possibility to separate fluorophores particularly beneficial in case of similar excitation spectra. Here, we demonstrate the distinction of fluorescent molecules based on FLIM phasor analysis, called lifetime separation, in live-cell imaging using open-source software for analysis. We showcase two applications using Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system. First, we separated the highly spectrally overlapping fluorophores mCherry and mKate2 to distinctively track tagged proteins in six-dimensional datasets to investigate cell division in the developing early embryo. Second, we separated fluorescence of tagged proteins of interest from masking natural autofluorescence in adult hermaphrodites. For FLIM data handling and workflow implementation, we developed the open-source plugin napari-flim-phasor-plotter to implement conversion, visualisation, analysis and reuse of FLIM data of different formats. Our work thus advances technical applications and bioimage data management and analysis in FLIM microscopy for life science research.

Details

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Microscopy
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 30 Sept 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 41025451
ORCID /0000-0002-7133-7474/work/194823896
ORCID /0000-0003-0203-1436/work/194825953
ORCID /0000-0003-3017-0978/work/194826236
ORCID /0000-0002-8367-5163/work/197317909

Keywords

Keywords

  • FLIM, live-cell imaging, napari, OMERO, phasor