Three-dimensional structural imaging of starch granules by second-harmonic generation circular dichroism.

Chirality is one of the most fundamental and essential structural properties of biological molecules. Many important biological molecules including amino acids and polysaccharides are intrinsically chiral. Conventionally, chiral species can be distinguished by interaction with circularly polarized light, and circular dichroism is one of the best-known approaches for chirality detection. As a linear optical process, circular dichroism suffers from very low signal contrast and lack of spatial resolution in the axial direction. It has been demonstrated that by incorporating nonlinear interaction with circularly polarized excitation, second-harmonic generation circular dichroism can provide much higher signal contrast. However, previous circular dichroism and second-harmonic generation circular dichroism studies are mostly limited to probe chiralities at surfaces and interfaces. It is known that second-harmonic generation, as a second-order nonlinear optical effect, provides excellent optical sectioning capability when combined with a laser-scanning microscope. In this work, we combine the axial resolving power of second-harmonic generation and chiral sensitivity of second-harmonic generation circular dichroism to realize three-dimensional chiral detection in biological tissues. Within the point spread function of a tight focus, second-harmonic generation circular dichroism could arise from the macroscopic supramolecular packing as well as the microscopic intramolecular chirality, so our aim is to clarify the origins of second-harmonic generation circular dichroism response in complicated three-dimensional biological systems. The sample we use is starch granules whose second-harmonic generation-active molecules are amylopectin with both microscopic chirality due to its helical structure and macroscopic chirality due to its crystallized packing. We found that in a starch granule, the second-harmonic generation for right-handed circularly polarized excitation is significantly different from second-harmonic generation for left-handed one, offering excellent second-harmonic generation circular dichroism contrast that approaches 100%. In addition, three-dimensional visualization of second-harmonic generation circular dichroism distribution with sub-micrometer spatial resolution is realized. We observed second-harmonic generation circular dichroism sign change across the starch granules, and the result suggests that in thick biological tissue, second-harmonic generation circular dichroism arises from macroscopic molecular packing. Our result provides a new method to visualize the organization of three-dimensional structures of starch granules. The second-harmonic generation circular dichroism imaging method expands the horizon of nonlinear chiroptical studies from simplified surface/solution environments to complicated biological tissues.