Advances in toponomics drug discovery: Imaging cycler microscopy correctly predicts a therapy method of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Life-Saving Microscopy Method for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Patients

The submission describes in the form of a communication recent experiences with a promising new therapeutic approach for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This approach is based on imaging cycler microscopy that led to the discovery of ALS specific cells in the blood, which invade the pyramidal system (lateral corticospinal tract) of ALS patients, where they compress motor axons. The depletion of these cells leads to remission of clinical symptoms and demonstrates the important role of these cells in ALS. The therapy will be offered to ALS patients in licensed and certified centers (in progress). © 2020 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry.

New Technologies to Image Tumors

The premise of this book is the importance of the tumor microenvironment (TME). Until recently, most research on and clinical attention to cancer biology, diagnosis, and prognosis were focused on the malignant (or premalignant) cellular compartment that could be readily appreciated using standard morphology-based imaging.

Image-Based Profiling of Synaptic Connectivity in Primary Neuronal Cell Culture

Neurological disorders display a broad spectrum of clinical manifestations. Yet, at the cellular level, virtually all these diseases converge into a common phenotype of dysregulated synaptic connectivity. In dementia, synapse dysfunction precedes neurodegeneration and cognitive impairment by several years, making the synapse a crucial entry point for the development of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Whereas high-resolution imaging and biochemical fractionations yield detailed insight into the molecular composition of the synapse, standardized assays are required to quickly gauge synaptic connectivity across large populations of cells under a variety of experimental conditions. Such screening capabilities have now become widely accessible with the advent of high-throughput, high-content microscopy. In this review, we discuss how microscopy-based approaches can be used to extract quantitative information about synaptic connectivity in primary neurons with deep coverage. We elaborate on microscopic readouts that may serve as a proxy for morphofunctional connectivity and we critically analyze their merits and limitations. Finally, we allude to the potential of alternative culture paradigms and integrative approaches to enable comprehensive profiling of synaptic connectivity.

Highly Multiplexed Imaging Uncovers Changes in Compositional Noise within Assembling Focal Adhesions

Integrin adhesome proteins bind each other in alternative manners, forming within the cell diverse cell-matrix adhesion sites with distinct properties. An intriguing question is how such modular assembly of adhesion sites is achieved correctly solely by self-organization of their components. Here we address this question using high-throughput multiplexed imaging of eight proteins and two phosphorylation sites in a large number of single focal adhesions. We found that during the assembly of focal adhesions the variances of protein densities decrease while the correlations between them increase, suggesting reduction in the noise levels within these structures. These changes correlate independently with the area and internal density of focal adhesions, but not with their age or shape. Artificial neural network analysis indicates that a joint consideration of multiple components improves the predictability of paxillin and zyxin levels in internally dense focal adhesions. This suggests that paxillin and zyxin densities in focal adhesions are fine-tuned by integrating the levels of multiple other components, thus averaging-out stochastic fluctuations. Based on these results we propose that increase in internal protein densities facilitates noise suppression in focal adhesions, while noise suppression enables their stable growth and further density increase—hence forming a feedback loop giving rise to a quality-controlled assembly.

Large molecular systems landscape uncovers T cell trapping in human skin cancer

Immune surveillance of tumour cells is an important function of CD8 T lymphocytes, which has failed in cancer for reasons still unknown in many respect but mainly related to cellular processes in the tumour microenvironment. Applying imaging cycler microscopy to analyse the immune contexture in a human skin cancer we could identify and map 7,000 distinct cell surface-associated multi-protein assemblies. The resulting combinatorial geometry-based high-functional resolution led to discovery of a mechanism of T cell trapping in the epidermis, which involves SPIKE, a network of suprabasal keratinocyte projections piercing and interconnecting CD8 T cells. It appears initiated by clusters of infrabasal T and dendritic cells connected via cell projections across a fractured basal lamina to suprabasal keratinocytes and T lymphocytes.