Background-deflection Brillouin microscopy reveals altered biomechanics of intracellular stress granules by ALS protein FUS.

ABSTRACT: Altered cellular biomechanics have been implicated as key photogenic triggers in age-related diseases. An aberrant liquid-to-solid phase transition, observed in in vitro reconstituted droplets of FUS protein, has been recently proposed as a possible pathogenic mechanism for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Whether such transition occurs in cell environments is currently unknown as a consequence of the limited measuring capability of the existing techniques, which are invasive or lack of subcellular resolution. Here we developed a non-contact and label-free imaging method, named background-deflection Brillouin microscopy, to investigate the three-dimensional intracellular biomechanics at a sub-micron resolution. Our method exploits diffraction to achieve an unprecedented 10,000-fold enh

SUBMITTER: Antonacci G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6131551 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature