Credit: Courtesy of the researchersMaking Molecules VisibleThe brand-new imaging technique is based on growth microscopy, a strategy developed in Boydens laboratory in 2015 based on a simple property: Instead of utilizing effective, pricey microscopic lens to get high-resolution images, the researchers designed a method to broaden the tissue itself, enabling it to be imaged at really high resolution with a routine light microscope.The technique works by embedding the tissue into a polymer that swells when water is added, and then softening up and breaking apart the proteins that generally hold tissue together. The antibodies usually used for this kind of labeling cant quickly squeeze through densely jam-packed tissue before its expanded.So, for this study, the authors designed a various tissue-softening protocol that breaks up the tissue however preserves proteins in the sample. “We saw that we could expand the tissue, we could decrowd the proteins, and we might image numerous, many proteins in the very same tissue by doing numerous rounds of staining.
A lot of those things we truly couldnt see with standard tools, however now we have a tool to look at those tissues at the nanoscale and attempt to comprehend these interactions,” states Pablo Valdes, a previous MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the lead author of the study.Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; a teacher of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences; a Howard Hughes Medical Institute private investigator; and a member of MITs McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and E. Antonio Chiocca, a teacher of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School and chair of neurosurgery at Brigham and Womens Hospital, are the senior authors of the research study, which was released recently in Science Translational Medicine.Using a novel microscopy method, MIT and Harvard Medical School scientists have imaged human brain tissue in greater information than ever previously. Credit: Courtesy of the researchersMaking Molecules VisibleThe brand-new imaging technique is based on expansion microscopy, a method developed in Boydens laboratory in 2015 based on a basic facility: Instead of utilizing powerful, costly microscopes to obtain high-resolution images, the scientists developed a way to broaden the tissue itself, permitting it to be imaged at very high resolution with a routine light microscope.The strategy works by embedding the tissue into a polymer that swells when water is included, and then softening up and breaking apart the proteins that typically hold tissue together. The antibodies usually used for this kind of labeling cant easily squeeze through densely packed tissue before its expanded.So, for this study, the authors designed a different tissue-softening procedure that breaks up the tissue but maintains proteins in the sample. “We saw that we could expand the tissue, we could decrowd the proteins, and we could image lots of, many proteins in the same tissue by doing several rounds of staining. These samples can be more hard to work with because they are generally embedded in paraffin and treated with other chemicals that require to be broken down before the tissue can be expanded.In this research study, the scientists identified up to 16 various particles per tissue sample.
