Everything at Once

Nothing in biology happens in isolation. Complex systems feed interwoven outcomes. Researchers try to unpick individual details, but each cell and molecule must be considered in the context of countless others. Being able to see multiple components of a cell or system simultaneously helps tell the whole story, but typical microscopy techniques have their limits. A new approach enables the use of up to eight colour labels at once, compared to the three or four of many existing technologies, to show multiple elements in detail over time. The team also developed a new protein-binding label and used the technique to study the trafficking of material at the cell surface. An algorithm unmixes overlapping colours to produce images like these bone cancer cells with cell parts labelled in different colours (top right), or particular elements highlighted such as the cell’s cytoskeleton (left and bottom), to help understand everything all at once.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Akaash Kumar and colleagues
• MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in bioRxiv, November 2024 (not peer reviewed)