Deep-ultraviolet microscopy reveals biomolecular spatiotemporal intracellular dynamics

Intracellular dynamics span a broad range of time scales and biomolecular processes, offering insights into cell health, functional state, phenotype, and response to external perturbations. Several label-free optical imaging approaches have been used to capture intracellular dynamics but are limited by spatiotemporal resolution and biomolecular specificity required to distinguish unique subcellular and metabolic processes. In this work, we demonstrate deep-ultraviolet (UV) microscopy as a powerful, label-free, high-resolution approach for quantifying multiscale intracellular dynamics with biomolecular specificity. By leveraging power spectral analysis and phasor analysis, we capture multiscale intracellular dynamics and analyze their UV wavelength-dependent behavior predicated by the absorption of different endogenous biomolecules. We apply this technique to prostate epithelial cell lines of increasing malignancy and reveal quantitative differences in dynamic intracellular activity that correlate with increased metabolic and organelle activity between phenotypes. Furthermore, we elucidate the molecular identities of structures and activity measured via UV dynamics with broad-band coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering spectroscopy and fluorescence microscopy. We identify lipid-specific structures, and mitochondrial-specific dynamics, among other biomolecular-specific dynamic behaviors. Together, this study demonstrates deep-UV microscopy as a powerful imaging platform for probing spatial and temporally variant intracellular dynamics with biomolecular specificity, with broad implications for cell phenotyping, tissue pathology, and studying new dynamic subcellular processes.