Look Again

Every time you look back at a beautiful painting, you might see something new. Researchers admire their biological samples with the same reverence, often analysing one sample in cycles, each time examining different molecules to build a complete picture. Establishing markers in the sample to align each viewing is important, especially if they have been physically expanded to show the detail more clearly. Now a team has created a new algorithm using a denser labelling system for more accurate 3D alignment – something that becomes tricky after repeated tissue expansion and imaging. The results are detailed 3D images that show the precise location of molecules in a sample such as a tumour or the pictured mouse brain slice – a composite after five rounds of imaging, with colours reflecting different molecules such as a structural protein in green, excitatory neurons in gold, and brain support cells in pink.

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 Hyunwoo Kim and Joon-Goon Kim, and colleagues
• Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, July 2025