Assignment 3, Part 1: visualizing actin with fluorescence contrast

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20.309: Biological Instrumentation and Measurement

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This is Part 1 of Assignment 3.

3T3 Actin.png

3T3 Actin plus CytoD.png

NIH3T3 mouse fibroblast cells. Actin stained with Alexa Fluor 568 Phalloidin.

Same cell type incubated with cytochalasin D, an inhibitor of actin polymerization, prior to fixing and stained.

Fluorescent staining

In this part of the lab, you will use fluorescence microscopy to investigate the effect of a toxin called cytochalasin D on the actin cytoskeleton. Cytochalasin D is an actin polymerization inhibitor. Exposure to cytochalasin D disrupts one of the main structural components of cells, causing marked changes in shape and mechanical properties. In this part of the lab, you will make and compare images of NIH 3T3 cells that have been exposed to cytochalasin D ones that have not been exposed. We will investigate how disrupting the actin cytoskeleton changes the mechanical properties of cells more deeply in the next couple of assignments.

But wait... can you actually take a picture of actin? Let's look at the five requirements for imaging something:

  • Optical access? Check. We will grow the cells in a single layer in a glass-bottom culture dish. Easy.
  • Contrast? Nope. Actin does not generate contrast in a normal, microscopic image.
  • Specificity? Nope.
  • Resolution? Sort of. Actin stress fibers can be very long — on the order of microns. But they are crazy thin, about 7 nm. The 40X objective we want to use has an NA of 0.65. So even for blue light, we will not be able to resolve the small dimension of actin fibers by orders of magnitude. We certainly won't be able to tell whether there is a single fiber or many close together. The monomers are way to small to see at all, but we are most interested in seeing the fibers and globs, so that's probably okay.
  • Noise margin? If there is no contrast or specificity, what does noise margin even mean?

We only have one requirement out of 5. That stinks. The actin structures we wish to examine are not normally visible under a microscope. Looks like we need some help. Fluorescence to the rescue! There are (at least) three ways to exploit fluorescence that will allow us to make an image of the actin cytoskeleton with high contrast and specificity:

  1. use genetic manipulations to modify the actin protein so that it fluoresces,
  2. use an antibody conjugated to a fluorescent dye, or
  3. use another non-antibody chemical compound that has high affinity for actin conjugated to a fluorescent dye.

Each of the approaches has advantages and drawbacks. We will use the third approach, which will require us to fix the cells before staining them with a fluorescent dye. For this to be a work out, we need a fluorescent dye that binds specifically to actin. Phalloidin is a mushroom toxin that binds to polymerized filamentous actin (F-actin) much more tightly than to actin monomers (G-actin). Sadly, phalloidin is not fluorescent. Before you get too disappointed, there may be a way to rescue this idea. Can you connect a phalloidin molecule to a fluorescent dye molecule? Wouldn't that be clever? I won't keep you in suspense any longer. Phalloidin does retain its high affinity for F-actin when it is conjugated to a dye! Victory! We would like the dye to be very bright so it will provide a good noise margin. Alexa Fluor 568 Phalloidin will do a grand job of making the actin cytoskeleton visible. By comparing images of Alexa Fluor 568 Phalloidin stained cells incubated with and without cyto-D, you will be able to observe the how CytoD affects the actin stress fiber network. And make some really pretty images, to boot.

20.309 130904 PhalloidinActin.png Alexa568.jpg
Example of a NIH 3T3 fibroblast cell labeled with rhodamine phalloidin Excitation and emission spectra for Alexa Fluor 568


Warning.jpg Wear gloves and lab coats when you are handling biological samples.


Procedures for fixing and labeling cells

3T3 Swiss Albino

You will be given two plates of cells:

  • one dish will be left untreated, and then fixed and labeled with phalloidin;
  • the second dish will be first treated with CytoD, and then fixed and labeled with phalloidin.

A key technique to keep in mind when working with live cells - to avoid shocking them with "cold" at 20°C - is to be sure that any solutions you add are pre-warmed to 37°C. We will keep a warm-water bath running for this purpose, in which we will keep the various media.

You are provided with 3T3 cells, which were prepared as follows: Cells were cultured at 37°C in 5% CO$ _2 $ in standard T75 flasks in a medium referred to as DMEM++. This consists of Dulbecco's Modified Eagle Medium (DMEM - Invitrogen) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS - Invitrogen), 1% of the antibiotic penicillin-streptomycin (Invitrogen), 1% non-essential amino acids, and 1% glutamine. The day prior to the fluorescence imaging, cells were plated on 35 mm glass-bottom cell culture dishes (MatTek, equipped with coverslip suited for optical microscopy studies).

Please read through the protocol for the two dishes below. Think about what you need to do so you can handle the dishes in parallel and save yourself some time.

Below is the protocol to stain 3T3 cells with Alexa Fluor 568 phalloidin:

  • It is optimal for your cells to be ~60% confluent. If cells are too crowded, they will not stretch properly and show their beautiful actin filaments. Thus, you'll want to image cells that are stretched out and not overlapping much. Note also that these cells remain alive until the addition of formaldehyde, therefore requiring that any buffer/media added be pre-warmed.
  1. Pre-warm 3.7% formaldehyde solution and phosphate buffered saline at pH 7.4 (PBS) in a 37°C water bath if available. Keep the formaldehyde wrapped in foil to protect from light.
  2. Retrieve an aliquot of cytochalasin D from the freezer and warm to 37°C.

Dish 1--CytoD Treated Cells

  • Prepare only ONE dish to be treated with cytochalasin D (CytoD). The other dish will be an untreated control.
  1. Remove the medium with a pipette and wash ONE dish 2X with 2 mL of pre-warmed PBS. Pipet into the dish gently to avoid washing away cells.
  2. Add 1 mL of the pre-warmed 10 μM CytoD solution to the same cell culture dish and incubate at 37°C for 15 minutes (and not a minute longer!). Afterwards, wash 2X with PBS.

Dish 1 (CytoD) & Dish 2 (Untreated) Stained in Parallel

  1. Remove the medium from the untreated dish (Dish 2) with a pipette and wash 2X with 2 mL of pre-warmed PBS. Pipet gently to avoid washing away cells. This assumes you've already washed your Cyto D plate (Dish 1).
  2. Carefully pipet 400 μL of 3.7% formaldehyde solution onto the cells in the central glass region of each dish and incubate for 10 minutes at room temperature. This "fixes" the cells, i.e. cross-links the intracellular proteins and freezes the cell structure.
  3. Wash each dish 3X with 1.5 mL PBS (note that this PBS solution no longer needs to be pre-warmed as the cells are dead).
  4. Extract each dish with 1.5 mL 0.1% Triton X-100 (a detergent) for 3-5 minutes. (Extraction refers to the partially dissolution of the plasma membrane of the cell.)
  5. Wash the cells 2X with 1.5 mL PBS.
  6. Incubate the fixed cells with 1.5 mL 1% BSA in PBS for 20 minutes. (BSA blocks the nonspecific binding sites.)
  7. Wash each dish 2X with PBS.
  8. Add 200 μL of Alexa Fluor 568 phalloidin solution (pre-mixed in methanol and PBS) to each dish. Carefully pipet this just onto the center of the dish, cover with aluminum foil, and incubate for 45 minutes at room temperature.
  9. Wash 3X with PBS, leaving the last wash of PBS in the dish so the cells don't dry out.
  10. Imaging your samples right away will give you the best results. However, the samples can be stored at +4°C (regular refrigerator) in PBS for a few days, wrapped in parafilm and foil.

Fluorescence imaging

In this part of the lab, you will make images of fluorescent microspheres plus your dishes of cells, and correct them for nonuniform illumination. In order to do the correction, you will need a reference image and dark images in addition to the image of the sample. See this page for more information about flat-field correction.

  • Reference Images: Take the reference image as close as possible in time to the sample images. Don't make any adjustments to your microscope between capturing the reference image and the sample image. For example, every time you bump the camera or re-align the LED illumination path, you will change the illumination profile and you must take a new reference. Adjusting the camera exposure and gain between recording the reference and sample images is okay.
  • Dark images: Each time you record an image (reference or sample), make sure to take a corresponding dark image using the EXACT SAME camera settings (i.e. use the exact same Exposure Time and Gain settings you had chosen for your reference/sample image). This is the only valid way to subtract the correct dark value from your reference/sample image.
  • Saving: Remember to save your images in a format that preserves all 12 bits. We recommend using the MATLAB save command to save data in a .mat file so you can reanalyze it later if necessary. You could also save in an image file format with imwrite. Convert the image to 16-bit, unsigned integer format with the correct range before saving. Go back and read this page if you need to refresh your memory.

Tips

A few tips to keep in mind as you go:

  • Visualizing the actin cytoskeleton under your 20.309 microscope will require mad skills. Since actin filaments and stress fibers are nanometer-scale objects, they are much dimmer than fluorescent beads or the dye solution - care must be taken to get good images of the cytoskeleton.
    • Use a reference slide to check that your epi-illuminator path is still optimally aligned. The cells are very dim; you won't do yourself any favors if you are throwing away light.
    • You may need to cover the microscope with a box or turn off the overhead lights to reduce room light contamination.
    • As soon as you expose the sample to high power LED light, the fluorescent dye will start to photobleach. You may find it helpful to use your brightfield microscope to find your cells before turning on your green LED illumination. Make sure the lab power supply is set to "INDEP." if you want to use Ch1 and Ch2 independently.
    • Once you've found cells in the brightfield, turn off the trans-illumination (red) LED and turn on the epi-illuminator. You will want to turn up the intensity of your LED, which can be achieved by increasing the current limit on the power supply, but never exceed 1A of current!
    • Fine tune the focus using a high gain/low exposure setting. (This setting will give you poor images with a lot of noise, but it's hard to focus the sample with a long exposure time.) Using the stretch contrast' tick box in the acquisition software may help to increase the image contrast on screen and make it easier to focus the image.
    • Finally, adjust the gain (to zero) and increase the exposure of the camera to get the best picture in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio.
  • For each microscopy sample, remember to check the exposure time, and take a corresponding dark image. Have someone record the camera settings used for each image.

Take images

  1. Record a reference image
    • Using a low intensity for your epi-illumination LED (i.e. a small current), take an image of the reference slide with the 40X objective.
    • Use the histogram in the UsefulImageAcquisitionTool to be certain that the image is exposed correctly
    • Turn off the LED and record a dark image (without changing any camera settings!)
  2. Using up to 1A of epi-illuminator LED current, record images of:
    • Fixed and stained untreated cells and a corresponding dark image
    • Fixed and stained cells treated with CytoD and a corresponding dark image
    • Again, be certain that the images are exposed correctly



Example image of CHO cells whose actin network is labeled with Alexa Fluor phalloidin

Flat field correction

Perform flat-field correction on the images.

  • Divide the image by a normalized version of your reference image minus the dark image (see this page for more detail).


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Turn in a figure with images of the the stained cell samples with and without Cyto-D.

    • For each sample, create 1 figure with 6 panels.
    • The panels of the figure should be: A) unprocessed image; B) dark image; C) reference image; D) dark reference image; E) flat-field corrected image; and F) histogram.
    • In the caption, specify the exposure and gain settings. Each image should have a scale bar (you may find this page handy). State the dimension of the scale bar in the caption.
    • For panel F, plot histograms of the unprocessed, dark, reference, and corrected image on the same set of axes. Plot log10( count ) on the vertical axis and intensity on the horizontal axis. Use a line plot instead of a bar chart for the histogram.
  1. Image profile
    • For one reference, dark and cell image set, plot an intensity profile across the same diagonal. You may alternately use a bead image from last week's assignment, along with it's unique reference and dark images. The intensity of your three images should be on the same scale, i.e., 0 to 65,535 or 0 to 1. Place all three profiles on a single set of axes for comparison. (Use the improfile command in MATLAB.)
  2. Discussion
    • What differences did you observe between the cells with and without CytoD?


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