In 2021, a technology developed at University of Michigan, called Seq-Scope, revolutionized the ability to map gene activity within intact tissue at microscopic resolution, enabling researchers to measure all expressed mRNA molecules and determine precisely where they are located within the tissue, using an Illumina sequencer machine.
The team behind the Seq-Scope method, led by Jun Hee Lee, Ph.D., has recently taken the technology even further.
Their findings are described in Nature Communications.
“We wondered what we might see if we had even better resolution,” said Lee, Professor of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at U-M Medical School.
“But we realized that that is actually physically impossible.”
Why?
Preparing a tissue slide to be read by an Illumina sequencer involves diffusing…