An increasing number of commercial skincare products are being manufactured with engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), prompting a need to fully understand how ENMs interact with the dermal barrier as a major biodistribution entry route. Although animal studies show that certain nanomaterials can cross the skin barrier, physiological differences between human and animal skin, such as the lack of sweat glands, limit the translational validity of these results. Current optical microscopy methods have limited capabilities to visualize ENMs within human skin tissues due to the high amount of background light scattering caused by the dense, ubiquitous extracellular matrix (ECM) of the skin. Here, we hypothesized that organic solvent-based tissue clearing ("immunolabeling-enabled three-dimensional imaging of solvent-cleared organs", or "iDISCO") would reduce background light scattering from the extracellular matrix of the skin to sufficiently improve imaging contrast for both 2D mapping of unlabeled metal oxide ENMs and 3D mapping of fluorescent nanoparticles. We successfully mapped the 2D distribution of label-free TiO2 and ZnO nanoparticles in cleared skin sections using correlated signals from darkfield, brightfield, and confocal microscopy, as well as micro-spectroscopy. Specifically, hyperspectral microscopy and Raman spectroscopy confirmed the identity of label-free ENMs which we mapped within human skin sections. We also measured the 3D distribution of fluorescently labeled Ag nanoparticles in cleared skin biopsies with wounded epidermal layers using light sheet fluorescence microscopy. Overall, this study explores a novel strategy for quantitatively mapping ENM distributions in cleared ex vivo human skin tissue models using multiple imaging modalities. By improving the imaging contrast, we present label-free 2D ENM tracking and 3D ENM mapping as promising capabilities for nanotoxicology investigations.
Keywords: 3D imaging; engineered nanomaterials; hyperspectral microscopy; skin imaging; tissue clearing.