The glory of tissue expansion technologies is that when structures, such as proteins that build nerve cell connections, are too small for a microscope to resolve, clever chemistry can make everything bigger and easier to see. But sometimes the chemical bonds involved form right where fluorescent antibody labels must attach to proteins to make them visible. Now a team of MIT researchers has solved the problem, demonstrating vast improvements in imaging the structure of neural connections with standard confocal microscopes.
The upgrade is implemented in “eMAP,” a new and improved version of the “magnified analysis of proteome,” or MAP, technology introduced in 2016 by the lab of Associate Professor Kwanghun Chung. The “e” stands for epitope-preserving, meaning that the binding sites for fluorescent antibody labels are much less likely to be blocked. In a recent paper in Science Advances, Chung and co-authors show that with eMAP, many proteins at neural connections, or “synapses,” can now be imaged when they could not before.
