Bye Bye Bleaching

It’s great getting out to enjoy the sunshine but sunshine comes with a downside, it bleaches things, like your clothes. That bleaching effect plays out in science too when using fluorescence microscopy to image cells with proteins that have been tagged with fluorescent markers. It’s a great way to see what those cells are doing but too much time under the microscope and those fluorescent markers fade. Researchers studying kidney organoids – 3D models of kidney tissue grown in a dish – face the same problem. Now a novel way to image these organoids in 3D has been developed, which causes far less bleaching. Using light sheet fluorescence microscopy, an organoid (pictured) can be viewed from multiple angles by placing it in a rotatable, see-through cylindrical gel. The team successfully tracked the fates of cells (yellow) in the organoid for 15 hours, providing a large window of time to gain helpful insights.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Marie Held and colleagues
• Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS ONE, July 2018