Imaging of cell membrane topography using Tamm plasmon coupled emission

Imaging of cellmembrane topography is important for a clear understanding of the various biological activities of cells.We propose a technique for imaging the cellmembrane topography that uses a metal-photonic crystal structure instead of a glass-water interface used in conventional polarized total internal reflection fluorescencemicroscopy (pTIRFM) techniques. Through themetal-photonic crystal of the proposed technique, thefluorophore labels on the cellmembrane can be excited by both the pand s-polarized excitation light, and in each case, the pand s-polarized radiation from the excitedfluorophores can be separated to form an image.We calculate the images of the cellmembrane topography that is fusing a granule using the proposed technique and pTIRFM.The image obtained by the proposed technique shows amuch greater contrast with respect to the background than that of the image obtained by pTIRFM.We alsofind that the structural similarity index of the image obtained by the proposed technique to a reference image is∼77%,which is only∼16% for the image obtained by pTIRFM. The proposed techniquewill help to obtain a clearer andmore accurate image of the cell membrane topography, and hence, a deeper understanding of different biological activities.