A Bigger Look

If you’re struggling to read text on your phone, you might simply expand it, so it’s easier to see. And you can do the same with biological matter, to better view the tiny structures of the body’s microscopic landscape. That’s the idea of expansion microscopy, which embeds biological samples on expandable gel and then images the results, able to see much more detail than using conventional methods. A new version carries out the process several times to achieve even finer resolution of cellular architecture, such as the cilia pictured, hair-like structures in the mouse eye that connect segments of photoreceptors essential for sight. They saw for the first time the regular pattern of a protein called CEP290 (blue), which could have implications for cilia-related diseases both in the eye, (such as Leber congenital amaurosis, which can lead to blindness from a young age), and beyond (like polycystic kidney disease).

Written by Anthony Lewis

• Image from work by Vincent Louvel and colleagues
• Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2023