Turbo FISH: a method for rapid single molecule RNA FISH.

Advances in RNA fluorescence in situ hybridization (RNA FISH) have allowed practitioners to detect individual RNA molecules in single cells via fluorescence microscopy, enabling highly accurate and sensitive quantification of gene expression. However, current methods typically employ hybridization t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS ONE
Main Authors: Sydney M Shaffer, Min-Tzu Wu, Marshall J Levesque, Arjun Raj
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2013
Subjects:
R
Q
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0075120
https://doaj.org/article/7746527def4e4439825711fee6868063
Description
Summary:Advances in RNA fluorescence in situ hybridization (RNA FISH) have allowed practitioners to detect individual RNA molecules in single cells via fluorescence microscopy, enabling highly accurate and sensitive quantification of gene expression. However, current methods typically employ hybridization times on the order of 2-16 hours, limiting its potential in applications like rapid diagnostics. We present here a set of conditions for RNA FISH (dubbed Turbo RNA FISH) that allow us to make accurate measurements with no more than 5 minutes of hybridization time and 3 minutes of washing, and show that hybridization times can go as low as 30 seconds while still producing quantifiable images. We further show that rapid hybridization is compatible with our recently developed iceFISH and SNP FISH variants of RNA FISH that enable chromosome and single base discrimination, respectively. Our method is simple and cost effective, and has the potential to dramatically increase the throughput and realm of applicability of RNA FISH.