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Abstract #0193

First Experimental Observation of Both Microscopic Anisotropy (UA) and Compartment Shape Anisotropy (CSA) in Randomly Oriented Biological Cells Using Double-PFG NMR

Noam Shemesh1, Evren zarslan2, Peter J. Basser2, Yoram Cohen1

1School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 2Section on Tissue Biophysics and Biomimetics, NICHD, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States


Randomly oriented compartments pose an inherent limitation for single-pulsed-field-gradient (s-PFG) methodologies such as DTI and q-space, and microstructural information (such as compartment shape and size) is lost. In this study, we demonstrate that the double-PFG (d-PFG) methodology can overcome the inherent limitations of s-PFG and extract accurate compartmental dimensions in fixed yeast. The size extracted from the fit is in excellent agreement with the size obtained from light microscopy. Moreover, we show that using different mixing times, the d-PFG experiment differentiates between spherical yeast and eccentric cyanobacteria. Our findings may be important in characterizing grey matter and other CNS tissues.