Visualizing Intracellular Sialylation with Click Chemistry and Expansion Microscopy

Metabolic labeling techniques allow the incorporation of bioorthogonal reporters into glycans, enabling the targeted bioconjugation of molecular dyes within cells through click and bioorthogonal chemistry. Metabolic oligosaccharide engineering (MOE) has attracted considerable interest due to the essential role of glycosylation in numerous biological processes that involve molecular recognition and its impact on pathologies ranging from cancer to genetic disorders to viral and bacterial infections. Although MOE is better known for the detection of cell surface glycoconjugates, it is also a very important methodology for the study of intracellular glycans in physiological and pathological contexts. Such studies greatly benefit from high spatial resolution. However, super-resolution microscopy is not readily available in most laboratories and poses challenges for daily implementation. Expansion microscopy is a recent alternative that enhances the resolution of microscopy by physically enlarging biological specimens labeled with fluorescent markers. By embedding the sample in a swellable gel and causing it to expand isotropically through chemical treatment, subcellular structures can be visualized with enhanced precision and resolution without the need for super-resolution techniques. In this work, we illustrate the capacity of expansion microscopy to visualize intracellular sialylated glycans through the combined use of MOE and click chemistry. Specifically, we propose a procedure for bioorthogonal labeling and expansion microscopy that employs a reporter targeting sialylation, which may be associated with immunofluorescence for co-localization studies. This protocol enables localization studies of sialoconjugate biosynthesis, intracellular trafficking, and recycling.