Back

Expansion Revealing: Decrowding Proteins to Unmask Invisible Brain Nanostructures

Sarkar, D.; Kang, J.; Wassie, A. T.; Schroeder, M. E.; Peng, Z.; Tarr, T. B.; Tang, A.-H.; Niederst, E.; Young, J. Z.; Tsai, L.-H.; Blanpied, T. A.; Boyden, E. S.

2020-09-26 bioengineering
10.1101/2020.08.29.273540 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Cells and tissues are made out of nanoscale building blocks, such as proteins, organized in crowded nanostructures. We show that many biomolecules, and the nanostructures in which they are embedded, may be invisible to prior imaging techniques, due to the inaccessibility of labels (e.g., antibodies) to biomolecules embedded within such crowded structures. We developed a technology, expansion revealing (ExR), which isotropically decrowds proteins from each other, to enable their labeling. We use ExR to discover the alignment of presynaptic calcium channels with postsynaptic machinery in intact brain circuits, as well as the existence of periodic amyloid nanoclusters containing ion channel proteins in Alzheimers model mice. Thus, ExR reveals nanostructures within complex biological specimens that were not previously visualizable, and may find broad use in biology. One Sentence SummaryDe-crowding biomolecules with Expansion Revealing unmasks fundamentally new nanostructures in intact brain tissue, which remained invisible otherwise.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.