Mapping densely packed αIIbβ3 receptors in murine blood platelets with expansion microscopy

Interrogating platelets and their densely packed, highly abundant receptor landscape is key to understand platelet clotting, a process that can save lives when stopping blood loss after an injury, but also kill when causing heart attack, stroke, or pulmonary embolism. The underlying key receptor distributions and interactions, in particular the relevance of integrin clustering, are not fully understood is because of highly abundant and densely distributed αIIbβ3 receptors. This makes receptor distributions difficult to assess even by super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. Here, we combine dual-color expansion and confocal microscopy with colocalization analysis to assess platelet receptor organization without the need of a super-resolution microscope. We show that 4x expansion is highly straight-forward for super-resolution microscopy of platelets, while 10x expansion provides higher precision at the price of increased efforts in sample preparation and imaging. Quantifying various receptor colocalization scenarios we demonstrate that expansion microscopy can pinpoint receptor distributions and interactions in resting and activated platelets being superior to conventional methods that fail in such dense 3D scenarios with highly abundant receptors. We reveal the presence of αIIbβ3 clusters in resting platelets, as well as in activated platelets, indicating that they contribute to the rapid platelet response during platelet clotting.