Magnetic resonance imaging of biological cells

Goals, challenges, recent advances and future prospects for magnetic resonance microscopy as a probe of single biological cells, are described. Important benchmarks of current capabilities in MR microscopy include performance of localized spectroscopy at volumes of 50 pl and concentration 33 mM and successful performance of numerous studies of cell physiology. Improvements in the future include biochemical spectroscopy investigations of living cell of large size, and studies of water, its diffusion and flow, and nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation times at resolution better than 10 μm.