Enhanced sensitivity for light and electron microscopic in situ hybridization with multiple simultaneous non-radioactive oligodeoxynucleotide probes.

Although oligonucleotide probes are useful for in situ hybridization, their low sensitivity compared to riboprobes and cDNA remains a problem. We have systematically examined the protocols to provide a general procedure that increases the sensitivity of oligoprobes for light and electron in situ hybridizations by using mixtures of multiple non-overlapping oligonucleotides (multi-oligoprobes). The protocol achieves these improvements with both radioactive and non-radioactive oligoprobes. With 33P-labeled probes in a semiquantitative assay, we found that mixtures of up to six vasopressin-directed multi-oligoprobes, each employed at saturating concentration, led to an additive signal with no significant increase of the background. Using this approach with non-radioactive oligoprobes, we were able to detect in the hypothalamus several low or moderately abundant mRNAs, such as vasopressin heterogeneous nuclear RNA and the galanin, dynorphin, and tyrosine hydroxylase mRNAs. Moreover, we showed that multi-oligoprobes used in a pre-embedding procedure were suitable for studying the ultrastructural compartmentalization of moderately abundant mRNAs. Finally, with the same basic approach we demonstrated that two sets of multi-oligoprobes can be combined for simultaneous detection of two different mRNAs using fluorescent dyes, making this approach suitable for high-resolution confocal analyses. Overall, our data demonstrate that multi-oligoprobes provide a sensitive tool of choice for various applications in which both well-preserved morphology and high sensitivity are needed. In particular, these probes appear ideal for study of the comparative subcellular localization of mRNAs at both the light and the electron microscopic level.