Highly Multiplexed, Quantitative Tissue Imaging at Cellular Resolution

AbstractPurpose of ReviewThere is a contemporary push to map tissues and their disease states quantitatively at single-cell and spatial resolution, but standard assays to do so, such as immunohistochemistry, have been historically lowly multiplexed (2 –4 measurements). This push has driven the development of several new multiplexed techniques for quantitative tissue imaging, which we review here.Recent FindingsStandard multiplexed imaging is primarily limited by fluorophore spectral overlap. Innovations increasing multiplexing capacity include iterative cycles of staining/bleaching/imaging, imaging mass spectrometry with metal-conjugated antibodies, leveraging fluorophore combinatorics, and coupling to sequencing-based methods.SummaryRecent progress has increased image-based multiplexing roughly 10-fold and, in some cases of nucleic acid analytes, to genome scale. This has given unprecedented biological and disease knowledge, but there is still substantial work to achieve genome scale across all types of analytes, as well as spatial scales greater than ~millimeters. Concomitantly, challenges in data storage, retrieval, and analysis will need to be solved moving forward.
Source: Current Pathobiology Reports - Category: Laboratory Medicine Source Type: research