Sep 26 2016
Ultivue announced today the worldwide commercial availability of Ultivue-2, its first reagent-based product for super resolution microscopy. Ultivue is a life sciences company that provides imaging kits, compatible with a wide range of microscopes, to enable unprecedented levels of resolution and high multiplexing in situ, vastly improving understanding of biology and medicine.
The reagents in the Ultivue-2 kit allow users to co-localize two cellular proteins with nanometer (nm)-scale precision. Like PALM and STORM super resolution techniques, Ultivue’s product enables 20-nm spatial resolution in cells. However, unlike these approaches, Ultivue-2 is exceptionally simple to implement for each protein to be localized.
“Super resolution microscopy is a high-performance life science tool that, until now, has been accessible only to research groups with expertise in, and dedicated equipment for, optical biophysics,” said CEO Michael Natan. “Ultivue’s proprietary DNA-PAINT technology, as incorporated into Ultivue-2, dramatically simplifies the effort required to generate super resolution data. It is also compatible with a wide variety of research fluorescence microscopes.”
“The whole super resolution workflow is greatly simplified by Ultivue,” summarized collaborator Sandrine Levêque-Fort from France’s Institute of Molecular Sciences of Orsay. Unlike comparable technologies which covalently attach specific fluorescent dyes onto the protein recognition element i.e. an antibody, Ultivue-2 decouples the dyes from the antibodies and enables the use of any dye.
An attractive feature of the Ultivue-2 technology is the ability to tune and optimize experimental conditions on the fly. “We really enjoyed the flexibility to adjust in real-time our optical parameters, for instance the exposure time, and the blinking kinetics according to the immuno-stained proteins’ density,” confirmed Christophe Leterrier from the CNRS/Aix-Marseille University.
Since Ultivue-2 relies on a constant replenishment of fluorescent dyes, it makes any experiment immune to photobleaching. This characteristic allows users to interrogate a larger sample area in all three dimensions. Jean-Baptiste Sibarita, a collaborator from the CNRS/University of Bordeaux, stated: “We have easily produced beautiful 3D super-resolution images of the entire cell nuclei by combining our home-built single-objective light-sheet microscope with Ultivue’s kit.” Levêque-Fort added: “We are also exploring deep-cell imaging application with Ultivue-2.”
“Because our technology decouples antibodies from fluorescent dyes, the Ultivue-2 kit leaves a fluorescence-free sample that can be used in conjunction with other imaging reagents or even other imaging modalities,” said Louis Levy, Ultivue’s Director of Business Development. Indeed, Dr. Leterrier noted: “We have applied Ultivue-2 in combination with dye-labeled phalloidin and could obtain a 3-color image of single cells in super resolution.”
Ultivue will be showcasing its technology and announcing additional products at the 2016 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in San Diego from November 12-16, 2016.
Source: http://www.ultivue.com/