Long-term Imaging Mammalian Cells using Wide-Field Microscopy

Actually what I'm gonna do, mount it in here first and then swap out You. So now I'm gonna aspirate try and be as gentle as possible.Okay. A few seconds just holding.Okay.Alright.

So the important features of our lifestyle imaging grid are that, so it's an inverted scope, which means the objective, the samples here in the objective is underneath. So the objective is pointing up and the whole scope, or practically the whole, practically the whole scope, including the objectives and the sample are at 37 degrees. So everything in this plastic box is at 37 degrees.

And right on top of the stage we have an air and CO2 mix. That is 5%CO2. So the idea is that the sample is actually in a cell, it's like a cell incubator.

And so we have, this is our mixer for the air and the CO2 and, and it gets humidified and heated and then piped onto the, the sample on the stage.Okay. And today we're just gonna be doing fluorescence one channel GFP fluorescence. This is the hose that the CO2 and 5%CO2 goes in and it just fits into the stage holder.

That's important. And then we can close these, take these down, and then we go to our first position. And what I'm gonna do is go to the first field, which is my control sample, and I'll pick positions based on what I see on the screen.

So I just make sure I actually look into the microscope in each new, well, because the focal plane for each of the wells is different, the, the dish is not perfectly flat on the bottom. So you will need to make fine adjustments when you move from well to the well. So right now I'm on the first, well, what I'll do is I'll focus, so I just hit, I just told, I just turned on the light, the transmitted light for the microscope.

And I have make sure all the light is going to the eye pieces. And so I just look in, make sure I get a nice clean field. And then what I'll do is turn that light off, turn the fluorescence light on, make sure the cells that I'm looking at look healthy and they're not apoptotic.

And, and I turn that off. And what I do next is send, so now I'm gonna start picking positions, which means I have to te send the light path to the camera. This is the camera right here.

So I tell the microscope to send all the camera, they don't see anything in the eye pieces. What I'll do is in the software controlling the microscope, I'll choose the right filter set, which for our purposes is psy. And then set an exposure time.

And I know these cells very well and I know that they take a 0.2 second exposure time. So I tell, that's what I tell the software to do. And what I'll do is hit focus.

This is, and it's basically just alive. The, A light will turn on and you can, oh, I don't know if you can see cells, but the reason this is a good field is because there's, all the cells are, even in terms of their fluorescence, There are no apoptotic cells. Apoptotic cells tend to be very bright and there's no dirt or schmutz in the field.

And you can see that they're actually, this is a metaphase cell and that's a metaphase cell, that's a cell that's probably just exited mitosis. And I can just tell that because it looks like those are, those two sets of chromatin are very nicely oriented to each other. Like they just exited an face.

So that's a good field. So, and now that I know that the exposure time and the filter set is correct, and this is gonna be software specific, I'll go and I'll take positions and now the software has memorized the X, Y, Z position of that field. And then when I do pick another field, it's, and I'll, so when I'm picking, when I'm picking new fields, but in the same, well, I'll use the, I'll move the i'll, I'll turn the shutter, I'll open the shutter and I'll look to see what I see on the screen and I'll pick fields based on that versus looking in the field.

So I don't see any of my tonics in there. But again, even nicely centered, these cells will go through my PS I continue, here's a good example. Here's a good example of what I would avoid that, see how bright that is?

That's very bright. That's probably remnants of an apoptotic cell. And the reason I would avoid that is because since it's so bright, when the software auto focuses, it will autofocus just on that and it won't be in the same plane as all these other cells.

And so I won't get any information from that field. That looks nice. There's a, this is a pro metaphase right here, That's A metaphase.

So, and I'm gonna take three positions per well. So that was three positions and now I'm going to go to my next Well, so you can, so what I will probably do is take images every 10 minutes. So it's a compromise.

Lifestyle imaging is always a compromise, right? You have to image, you have to keep the cells healthy, especially if you're interested in mitosis. So you have to minimize their exposure to the fluorescent line.

And, but you wanna get information. So you have to take images, you have to, so you have to compromise, you have to make a choice about what you want to capture, what kind of information you wanna capture. For our purposes, mitosis tends to take about an hour.

So if we're taking 10 minute intervals, that's pretty good. We see prophase, we see metaphase, we see anaphase, and we can, we can see when there are, there are treatments or drugs or siRNAs that affect those specific cell cycle stages. So for our purposes, that's enough, but we always want more.

We always want more positions or finer time and interval or something like that. So it's a compromise. So, and then I'll hit start.

And so our software, it does an autofocusing pass on the first pass. So once I hit start, it should start auto autofocusing and you'll see the shutter open, open and close between auto focusing. So I'll hit start.

So that's the shutter opening and closing. The Z motor is engaging and it's actually trying to find the plane with the most contrast, which will be the most in focus. You can actually see on the screen going in and out of finding the best plane of focus that might be worrisome.

So what it does is it, it drives the Z motor to find the best, the most in focus plane focus, well the most in image. And then it acquires picture there and then it learns that Z position. And then we'll use that Z position for the next 12 passes.

And then we'll do the auto focusing pass again. What Kind of experiments do they do? Okay, so our lab is mostly interested in understanding what regulates mitic progression, or at least I'm most interested in understanding that.

So with live cell imaging and especially our multi position, long-term imaging scope, you can take, you can film cells for two or three days entering anding mitosis, and you can image multiple rounds of mitosis so you can understand. And then you can put drugs or RNAs or any kind of perturbations on the cells that you would like to study. So you can understand how, how those drugs or, or genes are, are important in regulating mitotic progression.

Because it's not fixed cell work and live cell work, you can understand what, when you need to have a perturbation to affect mitosis or what stage of mitosis is affected. So it's really powerful in that respect. What, what are the main technical elements of this experiments?

What are the possible problems? Well, the biggest problem besides getting the rig set up, getting the rig set up is not trivial. A lot of people have the rig, but just making sure it works well for your application.

The financial element is not, you know, is not small. So there's the setting up of the apparatus and then, and then once you gather the data, there's a real data analysis issue. It takes these movie, if, so, if you're gathering 40 movies each with 30 cells, so you have 40 in 40 fields that you just filmed and each of those fields has 30 cells, then you have to sit down with each one of those movies and look at each one of those cells in that movie.

So it takes a really long time to do data analysis. And that's, so it takes a week to analyze data that it took you two days to collect. So there's a, that's a very big obstacle in terms of gathering lots of data.

So it's not, while it's high throughput data collection, it's not high throughput analysis. So what would you make to make this experiment really high throughput? So our lab is in the process of developing a program that does the data analysis automatically.

And it's a pretty decent program. It's not perfect. The human eye is always better, but it's getting there.

So What are the interesting application of this experiment? Maybe other fields you can mention? Besides cell division?

You mean for the, oh, for the live cell imaging? Yes.Well, you can do cell motility assays. You can, depending on the, the microscopy that's involved, you can, you know, look at how cells, you could look at tumor development if you really wanted to.

But there, you, you're, if as long as you have the right imaging set up, you can, you're pretty much not limited in terms of anything. Our scope happens to be just a wide field and we use 20 by 20 x objective. So it's a pretty low resolution set up, but that's sufficient for what we need to see.

So there are, but there definitely aren't, you wouldn't be limited. Anything that has any dynamic kind of experiment, which is biology, it would be, would really benefit from lifestyle imaging. So calcium imaging, although you couldn't do it on our apparatus, that's a live cell.

You definitely need live cell imaging for that. Like I said, patient assays, motility assays, those kinds of things would really benefit from live cell imaging. Would you like to tell a few words about your previous experience?

How long do you work on these techniques? What do you you work on before? Wow.So in my PhD I didn't work.

I did a lot of confocal microscopy, but no lifestyle imaging. And so during my postdoc I was, I helped Dr.King get this apparatus that, that we just used to set up these fragment, get that up and running. And, and so during my postdoc, I had a lot of experience with both widefield with TimeLapse imaging on our scope, which is the widefield and also TimeLapse imaging with confocal microscopy.

And I would say that it's really powerful. You get a lot of information, but it's not easy to get working perfectly. So it really requires a lot of attention and a lot of attention to details at every little step of the process.

And, and then you still have problems. So it's a tough application, but you can really get, if, if it's what you need to have to, to study your problem, your scientific problem, then it, it's invaluable in that respect, but it's tough. So find someone who knows what they're doing and use them.

That's my advice. So good.