A Review of Expansion Microscopy

Abstract

Expansion microscopy is a type of powerful and simple super-resolution microscopy that provides sub-diffraction images of biological samples by physically expanding them anchored in hydrogels. It has been combined with other existing methods to better visualize the microscopic structures of the samples. We will review some very important papers in this area about the early developments and explorations of general procedures and fundamental mechanisms of expansion microscopy. We will also review the recent developments and applications as well as their advantages and insufficiencies. Through our review, it is clear that the current expansion microscopy applications can help researchers to identify many sub-diffraction structures of the samples with many different fluorescence staining strategies, but there is a tradeoff between those strategies. Based on these points, we anticipate expansion microscopy will achieve a higher expansion factor and more powerful staining techniques.