Endocytosed nanogold fiducials for improved in-situ cryo-electron tomography tilt-series alignment

Cryo-electron tomography (CET) on cryo-focused ion beam (FIB)-milled lamellae is becoming a powerful technique for determining the structure of macromolecular complexes in their native cellular environment. Prior to tomogram reconstruction, CET tilt-series recorded on FIB lamellae need to be aligned. Traditionally, CET tilt-series alignment is performed with 5-20 nm gold fiducials, but it has thus far proven difficult to apply this to FIB lamellae of eukaryotic cells. In here, we describe a simple method to allow uptake of bovine serum albumin (BSA)-gold fiducials into mammalian cells via endocytosis, which can subsequently be used as fiducials for tilt-series alignment of cryo-FIB lamellae. We compare the alignment of tilt-series with BSA-gold fiducials to fiducial-less patch-tracking, and find better alignment results with BSA-gold. This technique can contribute to understand cells at a structural and ultrastructural level with both cryo- and room-temperature electron tomography. Furthermore, fluorescently labeled BSA-gold has the potential to be used as fiducials for correlative light and electron microscopy studies.