Revealing the carbohydrate pattern on a cell surface by super-resolution imaging

Carbohydrates are involved in various physiological and pathological activities including cell adhesion, signal transduction and tumor invasion. The distribution of carbohydrates is the molecular basis of their multiple functions, but remains poorly understood. Here, we employed direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM) to visualize the pattern of N-acetylglucosamine (N-GlcNAc) on Vero cell membranes at the nanometer level of resolution. We found that N-GlcNAcs exist in irregular clusters on the apical membrane with an average cluster area of about 0.37 μm2. Most of these N-GlcNAc clusters are co-localized with lipid rafts by dual-color dSTORM imaging, suggesting that carbohydrates are closely associated with lipid rafts as the functional domains. Our results demonstrate that super-resolution imaging is capable of characterizing the distribution of carbohydrates on the cellular surface at the molecular level.