Highly Sensitive and Multiplexed Protein Imaging With Cleavable Fluorescent Tyramide Reveals Human Neuronal Heterogeneity

The ability to comprehensively profile proteins in intact tissues is crucial for our understanding of health and disease. However, the existing methods suffer from low sensitivity and limited sample throughput. To address these issues, here we present a highly sensitive and multiplexed protein analysis approach using cleavable fluorescent tyramide and off-the-shelf antibodies. Compared with the current methods, this approach enhances the detection sensitivity and reduces the imaging time by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and can potentially detect hundreds of proteins in intact tissues at the optical resolution. Applying this approach, we studied protein expression heterogeneity in a population of genetically identical cells, and performed protein expression correlation analysis to identify co-regulated proteins. We also profiled >6,000 neurons in a human formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) hippocampus tissue. By partitioning these neurons into varied cell clusters based on their multiplexed protein expression profiles, we observed different sub-regions of the hippocampus consist of neurons from distinct clusters.