Multiscale Analysis of Cellular Composition and Morphology in Intact Cerebral Organoids

Abstract

Cerebral organoids recapitulate in vivo phenotypes and physiological functions of the brain and have great potential in studying brain development, modeling diseases, and conducting neural network research. It is essential to obtain whole-mount three-dimensional (3D) images of cerebral organoids at cellular levels to explore their characteristics and applications. Existing histological strategies sacrifice inherent spatial characteristics of organoids, and the strategy for volume imaging and 3D analysis of entire organoids is urgently needed. Here, we proposed a high-resolution imaging pipeline based on fluorescent labeling by viral transduction and 3D immunostaining with fluorescence micro-optical sectioning tomography (fMOST). We were able to image intact organoids using our pipeline, revealing cytoarchitecture information of organoids and the spatial localization of neurons and glial fibrillary acidic protein positive cells (GFAP+ cells). We performed single-cell reconstruction to analyze the morphology of neurons and GFAP+ cells. Localization and quantitative analysis of cortical layer markers revealed heterogeneity of organoids. This pipeline enabled acquisition of high-resolution spatial information of millimeter-scale organoids for analyzing their cell composition and morphology.