Nanoscale imaging of the adhesion core including integrin β1 on intact living cells using scanning electron-assisted dielectric-impedance microscopy

The integrins are a superfamily of transmembrane proteins composed of α and β subunit dimers involved in cell–cell and cell–extracellular matrix interactions. The largest integrin subgroup is integrin β1, which contributes to several malignant phenotypes. Recently, we have developed a novel imaging technology named scanning electron-assisted dielectric-impedance microscopy (SE-ADM), which visualizes untreated living mammalian cells in aqueous conditions with high contrast. Using the SE-ADM system, we observed 60-nm gold colloids with antibodies directly binding to the focal adhesion core containing integrin β1 on mammalian cancer cells without staining and fixation. The adhesion core contains three or four high-density regions of integrin β1 and connects to the actin filament. An adhesion core with high-density integrin β1 is suggested to contain 10–20 integrin dimers. Our SE-ADM system can also visualize various other membrane proteins in living cells in medium without staining and fixation.