True physiological imaging of subcellular dynamics requires studying cells within their parent organisms, where all the environmental cues that drive gene expression, and hence the phenotypes that we actually observe, are present. A complete understanding also requires volumetric imaging of the cell and its surroundings at high spatiotemporal resolution, without inducing undue stress on either. We combined lattice light-sheet microscopy with adaptive optics to achieve, across large multicellular volumes, noninvasive aberration-free imaging of subcellular processes, including endocytosis, organelle remodeling during mitosis, and the migration of axons, immune cells, and metastatic cancer cells in vivo. The technology reveals the phenotypic diversity within cells across different organisms and developmental stages and may offer insights into how cells harness their intrinsic variability to adapt to different physiological environments.
Optical and electron microscopy have made tremendous inroads in
understanding the complexity of the brain. However, optical microscopy offer
insufficient resolution to reveal subcellular details and electron microscopy
lacks the throughput and molecular contrast to visualize specific molecular
constituents over mm-scale or larger dimensions. We combined expansion
microscopy and lattice light-sheet microscopy to image the nanoscale spatial
relationships between proteins across the thickness of the mouse cortex or the
entire Drosophila brain. These included synaptic proteins at
dendritic spines, myelination along axons, and presynaptic densities at
dopaminergic neurons in every fly brain region. The technology should enable
statistically rich, large scale studies of neural development, sexual
dimorphism, degree of stereotypy, and structural correlations to behavior or
neural activity, all with molecular contrast.
Lattice light-sheet microscopy is used to examine two problems in membrane dynamics—molecular events in clathrin-coated pit formation and changes in cell shape during cell division. This methodology sets a new standard for imaging membrane dynamics in single cells and multicellular assemblies.
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