Microscopy technique could enable more informative biopsies

MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have devised a way to image biopsy samples with much higher resolution — an advance that could help doctors develop more accurate and inexpensive diagnostic tests.
For more than 100 years, conventional light microscopes have been vital tools for pathology. However, fine-scale details of cells cannot be seen with these scopes. The new technique relies on an approach known as expansion microscopy, developed originally in Edward Boyden’s lab at MIT, in which the researchers expand a tissue sample to 100 times its original volume before imaging it.
This expansion allows researchers to see features with a conventional light microscope that ordinarily could be seen only with an expensive, high-resolution electron microscope. It also reveals additional molecular information that the electron microscope cannot provide.
“It’s a technique that could have very broad application,” says Boyden, an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.
Boyden and his colleagues used this technique to distinguish early-stage breast lesions with high or low risk of progressing to cancer — a task that is challenging for human observers. This approach can also be applied to other diseases: In an analysis of kidney tissue, the researchers found that images of expanded samples revealed signs of kidney disease that can normally only be seen with an electron microscope.
“Using expansion microscopy, we are able to diagnose diseases that were previously impossible to diagnose with a conventional light microscope,” says Octavian Bucur, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and the Ludwig Center at Harvard, and one of the paper’s lead authors.
Boyden’s original expansion microscopy technique is based on embedding tissue samples in a dense, evenly generated polymer that swells when water is added. Before the swelling occurs, the researchers anchor to the polymer gel the molecules that they want to image, and they digest other proteins that normally hold tissue together.
This tissue enlargement allows researchers to obtain images with a resolution of around 70 nanometers, which was previously possible only with very specialized and expensive microscopes.
In the new study, the researchers set out to adapt the expansion process for biopsy tissue samples, which are usually embedded in paraffin wax, flash frozen, or stained with a chemical that makes cellular structures more visible.
The MIT/Harvard team devised a process to convert these samples into a state suitable for expansion. For example, they remove the chemical stain or paraffin by exposing the tissues to a chemical solvent called xylene. Then, they heat up the sample in another chemical called citrate. After that, the tissues go through an expansion process similar to the original version of the technique, but with stronger digestion steps to compensate for the strong chemical fixation of the samples.
During this procedure, the researchers can also add fluorescent labels for molecules of interest, including proteins that mark particular types of cells, or DNA or RNA with a specific sequence.
“The work of Zhao et al. describes a very clever way of extending the resolution of light microscopy to resolve detail beyond that seen with conventional methods,” says David Rimm, a professor of pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.


MIT
news.mit.edu/2017/microscopy-technique-could-enable-more-informative-biopsies-0717