Thousandfold Expansion Microscopy Biological

Thousandfold Expansion Microscopy

Biological macromolecules, such as proteins, are made of concatenated building blocks. We hypothesized that individual protein residues could be imaged by anchoring their side chains to a swellable polymer, cleaving backbone amide bonds, and expanding residues away from each other to a degree that enables them to be visualized separately. We introduce thousandfold expansion microscopy (1000ExM), a four-network interpenetrating hydrogel architecture that enables successive expansion from...