UBC Tissue Clearing and Expansion 2021

BCREGMED and the Dynamic Brain Circuits in Health & Disease team are excited to offer a TWO DAY online workshop to facilitate the use of tissue clearing and expansion techniques in the research lab.

September 22nd and 23rd
10AM – 1PM both days
ZOOM

Purpose
Biological specimens are intrinsically difficult to image.  Currently used tools and methods, which cut two-dimensional sections of tissue samples to provide insight into the cellular components, lack in their ability to reveal the systemic nature of tissues and organs which are inherently three-dimensional. On the other hand, imaging deep into intact tissues brings with it its own problems as a result of the obscuring effects of light scatter and the limitations of most commercial microscopes.

Techniques to eliminate this scatter and provide understanding into the true behavior of tissues and organs have been developed, however to our knowledge these techniques being under-utilized in research labs in BC due to their complexity and lack of appropriate equipment. With the recent purchase of a light sheet microscope for the School of Biomedical Engineering and a lattice light sheet microscope expected at the Centre for Brain Health, tissue clearing and expansion will be made possible however training is needed on the various protocols of expansion and clearing, 3D image analysis, and troubleshooting to make sure these techniques are implemented effectively.

SPEAKERS: 

Day 1 Wed Sept 22, 2021 

Presentations from Tissue Clearing and Expansion Experts

10:00-10:10am Welcome/Intro/General Housekeeping Announcements
10:10-10:20am Intro to tissue clearing (Mehwish Anwer; Postdoctoral Fellow, UBC)
10:20-10:50am Tools for holistic multi-scale imaging and molecular phenotyping of organ-scale systems (KC Chung; Associate Professor, MIT)
10:50-11:20am A Flexible Atlas Segmentation Tool for Multi-Area Processing of Biological Images (Jonathan Epp; Assistant Professor, UCalgary and Dylan Terstege)
11:20-11:30am Wellness Break
11:30-11:40am Intro to ExM (Sarah Ebert and Mathias Delhaye; PhDs, UBC)
11:40-12:10pm Multiplexed, Single-Cell Profiling of Chromatin States with Expansion Microscopy (Marcus Woodworth; PhD Candidate, UW)
12:10-12:40pm Expansion Microscopy: Development and Application (Ed Boyden; Professor, MIT)
12:40-1pm General discussion and Wrap-up

Day 2 Thurs Sept 23, 2021 

10:00-10:10am Intro/Welcome
10:10-11:00am Session 1: Experimental Setup and Protocols Roundtable with LifeCanvas Technologies
11:00-11:05am Wellness break
11:05-11:55 Session 2: Imaging of cleared and expanded tissue with Translucence Biosystems and Zeiss 
11:55-12:00pm Wellness break
12:00-12:50pm Session 3: Data Analysis with Arivis AG
12:50-1:00pm Closing Remarks.  Exit Survey.