121st General Meeting of the KCS

Type Poster Presentation
Area Life Chemistry
Room No. Event Hall
Time 4월 20일 (금요일) 11:00~12:30
Code BIO.P-270
Subject A Higher-Resolution Expansion Microscopy based on Simplified Hydrogel
Authors Sohyun Park, Yan Lee*
Division of Chemistry, Seoul National University, Korea
Abstract Expansion microscopy (ExM) can visualize small biological samples below the resolution limit of optical microscopy. In this technique, each molecule in the biological samples is initially cross-linked to the polymer network of hydrogel. After the cross-linking, the hydrogel is physically expanded to increase the relative distances between the biological molecules. The distribution of biological molecules in the expanded polymeric structure could be visualized by optical microscopy and the lateral resolution limit could be less than 70 nm. ExM is now attracting researcher’s attentions, especially in the field of cell biology and neurosciences. Most reported ExM technologies used mixture of acrylamide and sodium acrylate to produce the swellable polymer network. However, due to the different polymerization rate of two monomers, it is difficult to prepare hydrogel with homogeneous network structure. In this study, we present an enhanced ExM which utilizes post-modification of polyacrylamide. After preparation of dense acrylamide hydrogel within short time, the backbone was partially hydrolyzed for more expansion. The resulting expansion ratio was 50% higher than previous ExM technologies; thus the lateral resolution reached ~50 nm with conventional fluorescent microscope.
E-mail ssohyun@snu.ac.kr