New expansion microscopy methods magnify research’s impact
Published in Scanners and Imaging.
Unprecedented views of the interior of cells and other nanoscale structures are now possible thanks to innovations in expansion microscopy. The advancements could help provide future insight into neuroscience, pathology, and many other biological and medical fields.
In the paper “Magnify is a universal molecular anchoring strategy for expansion microscopy,” published Jan. 2 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and Brown University describe new protocols for dubbed Magnify.
“Magnify can be a potent and accessible tool for the biotechnology community,” said Yongxin (Leon) Zhao, the Eberly Family Career Development Associate Professor of Biological Sciences.
Zhao’s Biophotonics Lab is a leader in the field of enabling super-resolution imaging of biological samples through physically expanding samples in a process known as expansion microscopy. Through the process, samples are embedded in a swellable hydrogel that homogenously expands to increase the distance between molecules allowing them to be observed in greater resolution. This allows nanoscale biological structures that previously only could be viewed using expensive high-resolution imaging techniques to be seen with standard microscopy tools.
Magnify is a variant of expansion microscopy that allows researchers to use a new hydrogel formula, invented by Zhao’s team, that retains a spectrum of biomolecules, offers a broader application to a variety of tissues, and increases the expansion rate up to 11 times linearly or ~1,300 folds of the original volume.
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-expansion-microscopy-methods-magnify-impact.html