Expansion microscopy: enabling single cell analysis in intact biological systems

• Main Authors: Alon, Shahar (Author), Huynh, Grace H. (Author), Boyden, Edward S. (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory (Contributor), McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering (Contributor), Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley, 2020-04-14T19:49:45Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 There is a need for single cell analysis methods that enable the identification and localization of different kinds of biomolecules throughout cells and intact tissues, thereby allowing characterization and classification of individual cells and their relationships to each other within intact systems. Expansion microscopy (ExM) is a technology that physically magnifies tissues in an isotropic way, thereby achieving super-resolution microscopy on diffraction-limited microscopes, enabling rapid image acquisition and large field of view. As a result, ExM is well-positioned to integrate molecular content and cellular morphology, with the spatial precision sufficient to resolve individual biological building blocks, and the scale and accessibility required to deploy over extended 3-D objects like tissues and organs. ©2019