Optical Imaging of Bacterial Infections

The rise in multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria has become a global crisis. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of infection will facilitate antibiotic stewardship and preserve our ability to treat and cure patients from bacterial infection. Direct in situ imaging of bacteria offers the prospect of accurately diagnosing disease and monitoring patient outcomes and response to treatment in real-time. There have been many recent advances in the field of optical imaging of infection; namely in specific probe and fluorophore design. This combined with the advances in imaging device technology render direct optical imaging of infection a feasible approach for accurate diagnosis in the clinic. Despite this, there are currently no licensed molecular probes for clinical optical imaging of infection. Here we report some of the most promising and interesting probes and approaches under development for this purpose, which have been evaluated in in vivo models within the laboratory setting

Lateral interactions between adsorbed molecules: Investigations of CO on Ru(001) using nonlinear surface vibrational spectroscopies

We present an experimental and theoretical investigation into the coupling of C-O stretch vibrations of CO molecules adsorbed on Ru(001). We employ surface infrared-visible (IR-VIS) (IV) and infrared-infrared-visible (IR-IR-VIS) (IIV) sum-frequency generation (SFG) (IV-SFG and IIV-SFG, respectively) to investigate the effects of the intermolecular coupling through the nonlinear optical response of the system. As a consequence of the increased intermolecular interaction with increasing coverage due to the closer proximity of CO molecules on the surface, we observe pronounced frequency shifts of the vibrational resonances. In addition, the intensity behavior in both the IV-SFG and IIV-SFG spectra exhibits a strong nonlinear dependence on the coverage. These observations can be reproduced by extending previous theories for the coverage-dependent linear optical response (used to explain IR reflectance absorption data) to the nonlinear optical response. Expressions are derived for the second- and third-order nonlinear susceptibilities in terms of molecular properties such as the polarizability, hyperpolarizability, and second hyperpolarizability. We obtain very good quantitative agreement between theory and experiment. The analysis indicates that the principal effect of the intermolecular coupling on the nonlinear optical response is through a local-field correction for the linear IR field