Damstra Hugo G J, Mohar Boaz, Eddison Mark, Akhmanova Anna, Kapitein Lukas C, Tillberg Paul W
Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Biophysics, Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Janelia Research Campus, HHMI, Ashburn, Virginia 20147, USA.
Bio Protoc. 2023 Jun 20;13(12):e4698. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.4698.
Expansion microscopy (ExM) is a powerful technique to overcome the diffraction limit of light microscopy that can be applied in both tissues and cells. In ExM, samples are embedded in a swellable polymer gel to physically expand the sample and isotropically increase resolution in x, y, and z. By systematic exploration of the ExM recipe space, we developed a novel ExM method termed Ten-fold Robust Expansion Microscopy (TREx) that, as the original ExM method, requires no specialized equipment or procedures. TREx enables ten-fold expansion of both thick mouse brain tissue sections and cultured human cells, can be handled easily, and enables high-resolution subcellular imaging with a single expansion step. Furthermore, TREx can provide ultrastructural context to subcellular protein localization by combining antibody-stained samples with off-the-shelf small molecule stains for both total protein and membranes.
扩展显微镜技术(ExM)是一种强大的技术,可克服光学显微镜的衍射极限,适用于组织和细胞。在ExM中,样品被嵌入可膨胀的聚合物凝胶中,以使样品物理膨胀,并在x、y和z方向上各向同性地提高分辨率。通过系统探索ExM配方空间,我们开发了一种名为十倍稳健扩展显微镜技术(TREx)的新型ExM方法,该方法与原始ExM方法一样,不需要专门的设备或程序。TREx能够对厚的小鼠脑组织切片和培养的人类细胞进行十倍扩展,易于操作,并能通过单个扩展步骤实现高分辨率亚细胞成像。此外,通过将抗体染色样品与现成的用于总蛋白和膜的小分子染料相结合,TREx可以为亚细胞蛋白定位提供超微结构背景。