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Expansion microscopy turns 10!

Published January 22, 2025
Node
Swedish National Microscopy Infrastructure (NMI)
Technology
Expansion Microscopy

Happy birthday, Expansion Microscopy (ExM)! This super resolution technique is celebrating its 10 year anniversary - and is available in open access at several Euro-BioImaging Nodes.

Expansion microscopy (ExM) achieves sub-diffraction information by physically expanding the specimen. This allows it to seamlessly obtain resolutions of ~50 nm (up to 10 nm) in four colors in any widefield or confocal microscope. 

In the image below, provided by Ana Agostinho, SciLifeLab, Swedish NMI Node, you see an example of an expanded centriole in mammalian U2OS cell, image acquired on an LSM780 confocal microscope.  Read the interview with Ana Agostinho, to learn more about ExM and what it can be used for.

Expansion Microscopy: In this image, you see an example of an expanded centriole in mammalian U2OS cell, image acquired on an LSM780 confocal microscope. Image by Ana Agostinho, SciLifeLab, Swedish NMI Node.
In this image, you see an example of an expanded centriole in mammalian U2OS cell, image acquired on an LSM780 confocal microscope. Image by Ana Agostinho, SciLifeLab, Swedish NMI Node.

Several Euro-BioImaging Nodes offer this technique and can support the user in this sample preparation process, if required, and have imaging systems with the capacity to image the often large expanded samples.

Euro-BioImaging Nodes offering ExM

And don't miss this Technology Feature from Nature which explores the magic of ExM.

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