Nanoscopic Imaging of Human Tissue Sections via Physical and Isotropic Expansion

In modern pathology, optical microscopy plays an important role in disease diagnosis by revealing microscopic structures of clinical specimens. However, the fundamental physical diffraction limit prevents interrogation of nanoscale anatomy and subtle pathological changes when using conventional optical imaging approaches. Here, we describe a simple and inexpensive protocol, called expansion pathology (ExPath), for nanoscale optical imaging of common types of clinical primary tissue specimens, including both fixed-frozen or formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue sections. This method circumvents the optical diffraction limit by chemically transforming the tissue samples into tissue-hydrogel hybrid and physically expanding them isotropically across multiple scales in pure water. Due to expansion, previously unresolvable molecules are separated and thus can be observed using a conventional optical microscope.