On February 12, HZAU Professor Cao Gang and Associate Researcher Dai Jinxia recently published an article in the journal Nature Communications, developing a new generation of FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization) -- p-FISH rainbow. The existing barriers and deficiencies in FISH, especially in terms of technology, have been overcome by p-FISH rainbow with a capability to accurately detect diverse biomolecules (DNA, mRNA, lncRNA, miRNA, rRNA, proteins and neurotransmitters, etc.) in different species, from microorganisms to plants and animals individually and simultaneously with high efficiency.
The advent of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has greatly facilitated the identification of cell heterogeneity in multicellular organisms. However, it lacks the spatial location and the surrounding tissue microenvironment information of each cell cluster. FISH technologies can resolve the gene expression and spatial location of biomolecule by specific hybridization, which has greatly explored spatial expression information of genes in cell, and meanwhile, generated unprecedented insights into tissue microenvironment and functional mechanisms.
Despite the vast progress in FISH methods, new-generation FISH technologies are still in their infancy and have various unresolved challenges such as failing to detect DNA, RNA and proteins simultaneously. Besides, It is still challenging to achieve high signal intensity and efficiency while maintaining low background noise.
Overall, this team developed a high-efficiency, versatile and robust multiplex FISH method, π-FISH rainbow, with high-intensity signals and low background noise. This highly innovative method featuring superiority has been applied in animals, plants, and pathogenic microorganisms in frozen, paraffin, and whole-mount samples.
The study also made important new discoveries in biology such as realizing the detection of prostate cancer anti-androgen therapy-resistant marker ARV7 splicing variant. These efforts are greatly desired for precise diagnosis during clinical prostate cancer therapy and anti-androgen therapy resistance diagnosis.
Owing to the high efficiency and specificity of π-FISH rainbow, the team revealed, for the first time, a third localization pattern of lncRNA MALAT1 which showed that aggregated MALAT1 in the nucleus was colocalized with miR145-5p. As a powerful tool, π-FISH rainbow demonstrate a huge potential in basic science research and clinical diagnosis.
Professor Cao Gang and Associate Researcher Dai Jinxia are the co-corresponding authors of the paper, and PhD students Tao Yingfeng and Zhou Xiaoliu are the co-first authors. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Guangdong Provincial Key Area R&D Program, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China.
Source: http://news.hzau.edu.cn/2023/0213/65575.shtml
Translated by: Su Tong
Supervised by: Guo Haiyan
