Activation dynamics study of trapped platelets using a lab-built optical tweezers micro-raman spectrometer

It is well documented that platelet disorders can result from various causes and can lead to different disease conditions such as cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), thrombocythemia, thrombocytopenia, Autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and even cancer, to name a few. The diagnosis of many of these diseases mainly depends on imaging examinations, clinical analysis and neuropsychological tests, these may be time taking procedures and, have a high chances of false positive/false negative results. The Raman tweezers spectroscopy can provide trust worthy results without much time delay. In the present study the activation dynamics of platelets were studied and observed that the activation leads to biochemical and morphological changes, such as the formation of filopodia on the platelet surface, transformation in the shape from discoid to spherical, and translocation of aminophospholipids from inner leaflet to the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane. The Raman bands corresponding to phospholipids shows remarkable intensity variations during activation. The detailed knowledge regarding the activation dynamics of platelets will be important in monitoring CVDs, ADs, etc. and this paper illustrates a prospective method that can be incorporated into clinical settings in the near future to study and analyze platelet activation. This study will be the first to display the trapping of platelets in its live form to study their activation dynamics using an in-house assembled optical tweezers micro-Raman spectrometer.