Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive and label-free technique widely used in medical diagnosis and life science research, and its success has benefited greatly from continuing efforts on enhancing contrast and resolution. Here we reported nanoscale MRI in a single cell using an atomic-size quantum sensor. With nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, the intracellular protein ferritin has been imaged with a spatial resolution of ~ 10 nanometers, and ferritin-containing organelles were co-localized by correlative MRI and electron microscopy. Comparing to the current micrometer resolution in current state-of-art conventional MRI, our approach represents a 100-fold enhancement, and paves the way for MRI of intracellular proteins.
@article{arxiv.2002.08059,
title = {Nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging of proteins in a single cell},
author = {Pengfei Wang and Sanyou Chen and Maosen Guo and Shijie Peng and Mengqi Wang and Ming Chen and Wenchao Ma and Rui Zhang and Jihu Su and Xing Rong and Fazhan Shi and Tao Xu and Jiangfeng Du},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.08059},
year = {2020}
}