Expansion microscopy (ExM) is a rapidly emerging super-resolution microscopy technique that involves isotropic expansion of biological samples to improve spatial resolution. However, fluorescence signal dilution due to volumetric expansion is a hindrance to the widespread application of ExM. Here, we introduce plasmon-enhanced expansion microscopy (p-ExM) by harnessing an ultrabright fluorescent nanoconstruct, called plasmonic-fluor (PF), as a nanolabel. The unique structure of PFs renders nearly 15000-fold brighter fluorescence signal intensity and higher fluorescence retention following the ExM protocol (nearly 76%) compared to their conventional counterparts (<16% for IR-650). Individual PFs can be easily imaged using conventional fluorescence microscopes, making them excellent "digital" labels for ExM. We demonstrate that p-ExM enables improved tracing and decrypting of neural networks labeled with PFs, as evidenced by improved quantification of morphological markers (nearly a 2.5-fold increase in number of neurite terminal points). Overall, p-ExM complements the existing ExM techniques for probing structure-function relationships of various biological systems.
Keywords: expansion microscopy; fluorescence microscopy; nanoneuro interaction; plasmon-enhanced fluorescence; plasmonic-fluor.