
Practical Guide for Excellent GSDIM Super-Resolution Images
How to visualize cellular details with the Leica SR GSD 3D localization microscope
Do you know that most protists and bacteria lack one feature that each of our body cells has? Our cells touch and communicate with each other. They send and receive a variety of signals which coordinate their behavior to act together as a functional multicellular organism. Exploring the way of cellular communication and the ways how the cell surfaces interact to organize tissues and body structures is of great interest.
The overall architecture of a tissue is determined by adhesion mechanisms that involve cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions formed by cytoskeletal structures, desmosomes and hemidesmosomes. The cytoskeleton is present in all cells forming a dynamic network of interlinking filaments and tubules that extend through the cytoplasm, giving the cell their particular shape and tension and maintaining the intracellular transport of vesicular proteins and signal cascades. Understanding the structural organization of cell interactions is of great interest, because defects in these connections are linked to a variety of diseases.
Kees Jalink and his team of scientists at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam obtained new scientific insights into the molecular architecture of hemidesmosomes, cytoskeletal components, cell surface receptors and vesicular proteins with the help of Ground-State-Depletion (GSD)/