Nuclear poly-glutamine aggregates rupture the nuclear envelope and hinder its repair.

Huntington's disease (HD) is caused by a polyglutamine expansion of the huntingtin protein, resulting in the formation of polyglutamine aggregates. The mechanisms of toxicity that result in the complex HD pathology remain only partially understood. Here, we show that nuclear polyglutamine aggregates induce nuclear envelope (NE) blebbing and ruptures that are often repaired incompletely.

GelMap: intrinsic calibration and deformation mapping for expansion microscopy.

Expansion microscopy (ExM) is a powerful technique to overcome the diffraction limit of light microscopy by physically expanding biological specimen in three dimensions. Nonetheless, using ExM for quantitative or diagnostic applications requires robust quality control methods to precisely determine expansion factors and to map deformations due to anisotropic expansion. Here we present GelMap, a flexible workflow to introduce a fluorescent grid into pre-expanded hydrogels that scales with expansion and reports deformations.