vem gordon research conference - part 2

Kristina:
   Emails, zoom calls, twitter, slack, gather town… - most of us had already met each other one way or another. But meeting in person was so much better! There were the obvious inconsequential things we had missed in our online interactions (“I didn’t realize you were so tall!”), but way more important was the full human presence, as online media can still convey only small fragments of it. The conference was superbly organized, I learned a lot, and thoroughly enjoyed it throughout!
   Some observations: the most popular organelle highlighted in quite a few talks was the cilium (I can’t resist taking pictures of it either), followed closely by mitochondria! And, I have to admit, I didn’t know that mitochondria can also be found in some dendritic spines of neurons, even though I’ve been working with spines for ages now.
   As for array tomography, we had a good showing! About a quarter of the talks had AT in one form or another. It was interesting that molecular information, when available, was often obtained before embedding and sectioning (pre-embedding). As far as I remember, only one talk (mine) had the classical post-embedding AT immunolabeling. Which makes me think that a combination of pre-embedding for some antibodies and post-embedding for others, may turn out to be the most flexible and convenient approach. There are a few proteins where all the antibodies that I’ve tested refuse to work on resin sections – it is about time to try pre-embedding for these targets.
   There were many new cool things that we heard and saw. But I was surprised at how many already published works I had missed. Here are several on sample preparation and sectioning:

Help with finding and trimming the region of interest:

Meechan_schwab 2022

Automated large volume sample preparation:

Stempinski_López 2023

Working with human brain tissue: brain pH is a very good indicator of autopsy tissue quality:

Glausier_Lewis 2019

Human biopsy tissue sample preparation:

Karlupia_lichtman 2023

X-ray and AT?
Dr. Alexandra Pacureanu presented impressive studies using the European Synchrotron. It could be very useful to combine with AT and image much larger volumes with lower resolution, and also do elemental analysis.
​Examples:
Myelin looks great! (with 3D synchrotron X-ray nano-holotomography):

Dahlin_Bech 2020

Andersson_Dyrby 2020