Revealing nanostructures in brain tissue via protein decrowding by iterative expansion microscopy.

ABSTRACT: Many crowded biomolecular structures in cells and tissues are inaccessible to labelling antibodies. To understand how proteins within these structures are arranged with nanoscale precision therefore requires that these structures be decrowded before labelling. Here we show that an iterative variant of expansion microscopy (the permeation of cells and tissues by a swellable hydrogel followed by isotropic hydrogel expansion, to allow for enhanced imaging resolution with ordinary microscopes) enables the imaging of nanostructures in expanded yet otherwise intact tissues at a resolution of about 20 nm. The method, which we named 'expansion revealing' and validated with DNA-probe-based super-resolution microscopy, involves gel-anchoring reagents and the embedding, expansion and re-embedding of

SUBMITTER: Sarkar D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9551354 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature