Uranyl acetate as contrast agent for CLEM

Correlative light-lectron microscopy (CLEM) combines the high spatial resolution of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) with the capability of fluorescence light microscopy (FLM) to locate rare or transient cellular events within a large field of view. CLEM is etherefore a powerful technique to study cellular processes. Aligning images derived from both imaging modalities is a prerequisite to correlate the two microscopy data sets, and poor alignment can limit interpretability of the data. Here, we describe how uranyl acetate, a commonly-used contrast agent for TEM, can be induced to fluoresce brightly at cryogenic temperatures (−195°C) and imaged by cryoFLM using standard filter sets.

Tuijtel, M.W., Mulder, A.A., Posthuma, C.C., van der Hoeven, B., Koster, A.J., Barcena, M., Faas, F.G.A. and Sharp, T.H., "Inducing Fluorescence of Uranyl Acetate as a Dual-Purpose Contrast Agent for Correlative Light-Electron Microscopy with Nanometre Precision" (2017) Sci Rep, 7, 1, 10442.

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-10905-x