#tissue samples

Every specimen I do at the museum has three parts. The spread wing and the skin are the two I post, for obvious reasons, but every specimen has a corresponding tissue sample that lives in the freezer to be used for DNA research etc. (and I am definitely not nervous about getting stuck in the walk in freezer). After they’re cataloged they’ll move to the -80 freezer for longterm storage.

They’re not super exciting to look at but they’re one of the most important parts of the specimen, and it’s satisfying to see a whole row of my box filled out at my new museum.

A Lost Library

There is a vast library bursting with untapped information, but all the books were locked in place when they were put on the shelves. This is the bank of patient tissue samples held in hospitals and labs around the world. The genetic material in samples is often degraded during the preservation process, but now a new tool is piecing the information back together. The approach, called Patho-DBiT, tags and reads various forms of RNA and pinpoints where each piece came from within a tissue sample. In doing so, it maps gene expression (where a gene is being read) across a sample (pictured with expression types coloured on a cell-by-cell level throughout a 5-year-old cancer sample), detecting tiny mutations that may be linked to tumour development. This opens up access for researchers to investigate the genetics of tumour progression, the tumour environment itself, and even potential drug targets in samples just waiting to be explored.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Zhiliang Bai, Dingyao Zhang, Yan Gao, Daiwei Zhang & Shuozhen Bao, and colleagues

Depts of Biomedical Engineering; Genetics; Pathology, Yale University, CT; Center for Computational & Genomic Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Dept of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, PA, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Published in Cell, November 2024

06-18-2018

spent the day in the lab embedding tissue samples–it was way more fun than the sectioning we usually do!

with @casuallycallipygous

Stain Removal

To make sense of the vast detail in any biological sample, most microscopy techniques hone in on one particular aspect or another, often staining or altering the tissue to make certain structures or molecules more visible. This approach has brought great insights, but it does limit the information each precious sample can provide, and in isolating and interfering with samples it’s possible to introduce changes that cloud your conclusions. A new approach to imaging kidney tissue avoids any staining or chemical alteration by using three imaging techniques simultaneously to observe multiple molecular and structural features at once (pictured, a composite image from a diabetic patient’s biopsy with each colour layer showing additional information, such as saturated fatty acids in green, collagen in pink, and many more). Capturing multiple features in one sample helps show relationships between molecular and structural processes, and could provide much-needed improvements to kidney disease diagnosis.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Anthony A. Fung and colleagues

Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Image contributed by the authors under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence

Published in Nature Communications, May 2025

Illuminating Research

Life’s details often go unnoticed. Perhaps no one was looking, or they’re too small to see, but sometimes it’s simply a challenge to take a picture that is true to life. Scientists photographing their precious samples face lighting challenges – hard light creates shadows and glare, soft light requires some areas to be over-exposed so that others can be seen at all. This Buprestidae beetle is having a photoshoot with new 3D-printed kit – a dome placed around the insect scatters soft diffuse light evenly across its body. The problem of glare (top) is solved using a 'light-shielding ring' to block out the direct shine of the surrounding LED lights (bottom). The kit’s design is freely available and adaptable – scaled to different sample sizes – perhaps revealing subtle details in insect models for human disease or one day in human tissue samples, helping to show biomedical research in its best light.

Written by John Ankers

Image adapted from work by Fabian Bäumler and colleagues

Functional Morphology and Biomechanics, Institute of Zoology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Scientific Reports, July 2020