Measurement of Three-Dimensional Anisotropic Diffusion by Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) (CAT#: STEM-MT-0063-WXH)

Introduction

Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) is a versatile and widely used tool for the determination of local diffusion properties within solutions, cells, tissues, and biomaterials. Due to the high spatial resolution, FRAP offers the possibility to microscopically examine a specific region of a sample.
More importantly, a variety of FRAP techniques has been developed to understand the relationship between tissue structure and solute diffusion properties by determining the diffusional anisotropy in the biological tissues. For example, the fluorescence imaging of continuous point photobleaching (FICOPP), elliptical surface photobleaching, line FRAP and spatial Fourier analysis (SFA) based FRAP techniques have been utilized to investigate the diffusional anisotropy of different solutes in varying types of tissues (e.g., the cartilaginous tissues and fibrosarcoma tumors). It was found that the structure and orientation of collagen fibers in the tissue extracellular matrix (ECM) leads to diffusion anisotropy.