Mislow Symposium featuring Xiaowei Zhuang

Inside living organisms, thousands of different genes function collectively to give rise to cellular behavior and tissue function. Understanding the behaviors and functions of cells and tissues thus require imaging at the genome scale, which will advance our understanding in many areas of biology, ranging from the regulation of gene expression in cells to the development of cell fate and the organization of cell types in complex tissues. We developed a single-cell transcriptome and genome imaging method, multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH), which allows RNA, DNA, and epigenetic marks to be imaged at the genome scale. This approach enabled spatially resolved transcriptomic profiling, epigenomic profiling, and 3D-genome organization mapping in single cells. The ability to perform single-cell gene expression profiling in intact tissues further enabled the identification, spatial mapping, and functional annotation of distinct cell types in intact tissues. In this talk, I will describe the MERFISH technology and its applications, with a focus on mapping the molecular, spatial, and functional organizations of distinct cell types in the mouse and human brain.