Cancer Research Using Correlative Light Electron Microscopy

The devastating impacts of cancer are ultimately the result of disorders at the cellular and molecular scales. To relate in vivo behavior to micro- and nanoscale observations, researchers are increasingly reliant on multi-technique, multi-scale analysis. While this data can be highly informative, it requires accurate correlation between the different imaging modalities. Thermo Scientific Amira Software is designed to reliably process, visualize, and analyze data from different imaging sources into a single correlated dataset, allowing researchers to seamlessly transition between different imaging scales.

Hoping to deconvolute the complex process of cancer metastasis, particularly how cancer cells cross the blood-brain barrier, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, utilized multi-scale analysis to combine the imaging data from intravital microscopy (IVM), X-ray diffraction, and electron microscopy (EM). Using Amira Software, they were able to relate the in vivo observations of IVM with the higher resolution data of X-ray tomography in order to pinpoint the location of singular cancer cells. Once this region of the sample was isolated, electron microscopy was capable of generating high-resolution images of the cancer cell and its interactions with adjacent blood vessel cells.