A terahertz chemical microscopy for an agar culture medium

In the field of life science, the research trends are to visualize `living´ materials as it is, whereas most of conventional imaging methods require pre-treatments to living samples. In our group, a terahertz chemical microscope (TCM) has been proposed and developed to investigate metabolism by the cell activity. Here the agar medium, which was generally used to cultivate cells, was immobilized on the sensing plate of TCM and the concentration of the glucose in the buffer solutions on it was detected as the terahertz amplitude shift. This result suggests that the TCM can detect the glucose in the solutions and it may possible to detect the cell activity cultivated on the agar mediums.