Lab of Senior Fellow Xiaowei Zhuang develops new method to map RNA variants

Harvard researchers have unveiled a new way to map the molecular activity in complex tissues that can reveal which specific RNA variants genes produce in every cell and every region of the tissue. The technology, described in a new paper in Cell, could reshape how scientists investigate tissue function and disease. The work comes from the lab of Senior Fellow Xiaowei Zhuang, David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Her group is known for pushing microscopy beyond traditional limits and previously developed MERFISH, a genome-scale imaging method that can measure thousands of RNA molecules in intact tissues with extremely fine spatial detail. The researchers demonstrated this technology in the brain, and it may extend to cancers and immune disorders as well.

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^{From left: Professor Xiaowei Zhuang, graduate student Phil Che, researcher Tim Blosser, postdoctoral scholar Limor Cohen, research associate Aaron Halpern, and postdoctoral scholar Xingjie PanCarlos Sanchez/Harvard FAS Staff Photographer}