Excellent Imagery

Often the more you learn about something, the more questions you have. In science, this deepening desire for detail drives demand for ever-finer microscopy images. A recent approach provides precise imaging of tiny specimens by uniformly swelling tissue samples and visualising the results. However, this technique was unsuitable for viewing C. elegans, the simple worm that's the starting point for countless biological studies into the fundamentals of life, because of its inflexible outer layer. A new approach called ExCel allows expansion of C. elegans (pictured), to provide simultaneous information on the location of DNA (blue), the similar RNA (red), and specific selected proteins of interest made to fluoresce (green). The system has already identified new interactions between cells, and revealed genetic expression in individual neurons simultaneously. This magnified view will help let researchers ask detailed questions about processes that underpin health in not just these worms, but us too.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Chih-Chieh (Jay) Yu and colleagues
• Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, May 2020