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Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure
Biological samples are mainly composed of elements with a low atomic number which show a relatively low electron scattering power. For Transmission Electron Microscopy analysis, biological samples are generally embedded in resins, which allow thin sectioning of the specimen. Embedding resins are als...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7360580/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32665608 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68405-4 |
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author | Moscardini, Aldo Di Pietro, Sebastiano Signore, Giovanni Parlanti, Paola Santi, Melissa Gemmi, Mauro Cappello, Valentina |
author_facet | Moscardini, Aldo Di Pietro, Sebastiano Signore, Giovanni Parlanti, Paola Santi, Melissa Gemmi, Mauro Cappello, Valentina |
author_sort | Moscardini, Aldo |
collection | PubMed |
description | Biological samples are mainly composed of elements with a low atomic number which show a relatively low electron scattering power. For Transmission Electron Microscopy analysis, biological samples are generally embedded in resins, which allow thin sectioning of the specimen. Embedding resins are also composed by light atoms, thus the contrast difference between the biological sample and the surrounding resin is minimal. Due to that reason in the last decades, several staining solutions and approaches, performed with heavy metal salts, have been developed with the purpose of enhancing both the intrinsic sample contrast and the differences between the sample and resin. The best staining was achieved with the uranyl acetate (UA) solution, which has been the election method for the study of morphology in biological samples. More recently several alternatives for UA have been proposed to get rid of its radiogenic issues, but to date none of these solutions has achieved efficiencies comparable to UA. In this work, we propose a different staining solution (X Solution or X SOL), characterized by lanthanide polyoxometalates (LnPOMs) as heavy atoms source, which could be used alternatively to UA in negative staining (NS), in en bloc staining, and post sectioning staining (PSS) of biological samples. Furthermore, we show an extensive chemical characterization of the LnPOM species present in the solution and the detailed work for its final formulation, which brought remarkable results, and even better performances than UA. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7360580 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-73605802020-07-16 Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure Moscardini, Aldo Di Pietro, Sebastiano Signore, Giovanni Parlanti, Paola Santi, Melissa Gemmi, Mauro Cappello, Valentina Sci Rep Article Biological samples are mainly composed of elements with a low atomic number which show a relatively low electron scattering power. For Transmission Electron Microscopy analysis, biological samples are generally embedded in resins, which allow thin sectioning of the specimen. Embedding resins are also composed by light atoms, thus the contrast difference between the biological sample and the surrounding resin is minimal. Due to that reason in the last decades, several staining solutions and approaches, performed with heavy metal salts, have been developed with the purpose of enhancing both the intrinsic sample contrast and the differences between the sample and resin. The best staining was achieved with the uranyl acetate (UA) solution, which has been the election method for the study of morphology in biological samples. More recently several alternatives for UA have been proposed to get rid of its radiogenic issues, but to date none of these solutions has achieved efficiencies comparable to UA. In this work, we propose a different staining solution (X Solution or X SOL), characterized by lanthanide polyoxometalates (LnPOMs) as heavy atoms source, which could be used alternatively to UA in negative staining (NS), in en bloc staining, and post sectioning staining (PSS) of biological samples. Furthermore, we show an extensive chemical characterization of the LnPOM species present in the solution and the detailed work for its final formulation, which brought remarkable results, and even better performances than UA. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-07-14 /pmc/articles/PMC7360580/ /pubmed/32665608 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68405-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Moscardini, Aldo Di Pietro, Sebastiano Signore, Giovanni Parlanti, Paola Santi, Melissa Gemmi, Mauro Cappello, Valentina Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
title | Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
title_full | Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
title_fullStr | Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
title_full_unstemmed | Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
title_short | Uranium-free X solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
title_sort | uranium-free x solution: a new generation contrast agent for biological samples ultrastructure |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7360580/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32665608 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68405-4 |
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