Disease Hunters Enlarge the Enemy to Get a Better Look

Scientific American --------- Back in 2012 some of Ed Boyden’s synthetic neurobiology graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology made a joke: Instead of struggling with slow, bulky and expensive imaging technologies to magnify the tiny neurons in their mouse brain samples, why not make the brains themselves bigger?Such musings proved prescient when Boyden and his students later stumbled on a polymer that swells (similar to a substance found in the cores of baby diapers), and is able to absorb 200 to 300 times its mass in water. Over the next few years Boyden’s group tinkered with this material to create a new technique called expansion microscopy (ExM), and used it to successfully expand mouse brain samples to about four times their normal size. This allowed them to see structures down to 70 nanometers—roughly the diameter of a flu virus—with common, light-based microscopes (whose lower limit is normally about 200 nanometers). To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.