Spatiotemporal chemical imaging in living brain tissues

Spatiotemporal alterations in the chemical and structural makeup of biomolecules play an essential role in the onset and progression of various diseases, including Alzheimer's Disease. Early structural changes at the submicron level often occur well before disease symptoms can be recognized and before morphological changes can be detected using conventional tissue-level methodologies such as spatial proteomics, histology, or immunohistochemical staining. Consequently, there is a critical need for structure-sensitive techniques. Here, I present an approach capable of spatiotemporal chemical imaging of amyloid structures at submicron resolution within their native environment. Using a recently established technique, the Medical Microspectroscopy Group from Lund University conducted groundbreaking experiments that enabled the monitoring of amyloids in the process of formation, proliferation, and cellular damage directly within living tissues. To assess structural changes with sub-micron precision, we employed optical photothermal infrared (O-PTIR) microspectroscopy, a technique sensitive to amyloid structures in freshly extracted brain tissue from APP/PS1 mice.