Label-free monitoring of cell death induced by oxidative stress in living human cells using terahertz ATR spectroscopy

Abstract

We demonstrated that attenuated total reflectance terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (ATR THz-TDS) is able to monitor oxidative stress response of living human cells, which is proven in this work that it is an efficient non-invasive, label-free, real-time and <i>in situ</i> monitoring of cell death. Furthermore, the dielectric constant and dielectric loss of cultured living human breast epithelial cells, and along with their evolution under oxidative stress response induced by high concentration of H₂O₂, were quantitatively determined in the work. Our observation and results were finally confirmed using standard fluorescence-labeled flow cytometry measurements and visible fluorescence imaging.