Ultrastructural histochemistry in biomedical research: Alive and kicking

Abstract

The high-resolution images provided by the electron microscopy has constituted a limitless source of information in any research field of life and materials science since the early Thirties of the last century. Browsing the scientific literature, electron microscopy was especially popular from the 1970’s to 80’s, whereas during the 90’s, with the advent of innovative molecular techniques, electron microscopy seemed to be downgraded to a subordinate role, as a merely descriptive technique. Ultra -structural histochemistry was crucial to promote the Renaissance of electron microscopy, when it became evident that a precise localization of molecules in the biological environment was necessary to fully understand their functional role. Nowadays, electron microscopy is still irreplaceable for ultrastructural morphology in basic and applied biomedical research, while the application of correlative light and electron microscopy and of refined ultrastructural histochemical techniques gives electron microscopy a central role in functional cell and tissue biology, as a really unique tool for high-resolution molecular biology in situ.

Twenty years of histochemistry in the third millennium, browsing the scientific literature

“…The articles dealing with new methods or technical refinements were numerous and their percentage increased mainly in the last three years 4-19 when improvements in all the different steps of tissue preparation were proposed, from fixation 4-8 and embedding, 9 to antigen retrieval 10-11 and staining. 12-15 Several papers dealt with ultrastructural cytochemistry, 9 , 15 , 16 imaging techniques 17-19 and microanalysis. 20 This is not surprising for a histochemical journal, as setting up refined techniques is crucial for their appropriate and targeted application to visualize specific chemical species under different detecting procedures.…”

“…The reason for the extensive use of histochemistry by researchers in a variety of scientific fields is certainly due to the unique opportunity this discipline offers to specifically locate molecules in the tissues, cells and subcellular sites where they are present and exert their structural and functional roles. Thanks to ultrastructural cytochemistry 16 and the tremendous improvement in super-resolution microscopy, 112 , 113 it has become possible to track histochemically labelled molecules at the nanoscale by microscopy imaging, and this has often been crucial to reach a mechanistic explanation of the cell functions in organs and tissues, under physiological or pathological conditions.…”

A journal of histochemistry as a forum for non-histochemical scientific societies

“…Histochemical methods and techniques at light and electron microscopy have wide application in a great variety of subjects in biology and medicine, 1,2 from basic cell biology in animals and plants, 3 to zoology and botany, developmental biology, cytogenetics, functional and morbid anatomy, pathology, 4 tumor cell biology, 5 and so forth. Thus it is not surprising that histochemistry in all its aspects (basic histochemistry, immunohistochemistry, enzymeand lectin histochemistry, in situ hybridization) have been used in more than 590,000 scientific articles published in indexed biomedical journals, during the last twenty years (source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.…”