Technology drives biological innovation. The continuous innovation of new technology over the past century has led to our continuously improved understanding of biological systems. In the future, research labs will continue to adopt new technologies that make it possible to perform previously impossible experiments: new instruments will make new experiments routine. Since biological systems are comprised of spatially organized cells, each making use of a particular combination of the genes available in its genomic repertoire, this will include technologies that can perform highly multiplexed biomarker analysis across whole tissues with single-cell resolution, giving us direct insight into biology.
Right now, it is common to measure just a few biomarkers at a time across biological tissues (e.g., immunofluorescence staining of a slice of brain tissue for a single protein), but most techniques that capture this spatial data do not have high enough bandwidth to capture more than just a few biomarkers such as RNA or proteins. Yet, within the genome, there are tens of thousands of unique genes. Measuring just one gene doesn’t provide a clear indication of what’s happening and distinguishes the variety of cells present. On the other hand, experiments that perform highly multiplexed measurements tend to lose spatial context in doing so.
This deficiency can make it difficult to understand the biological complexities. Fortunately, an up-and-coming field called spatial biology promises to bridge the gap. Researchers in this field today are beginning to use technologies that simultaneously capture the arrangement of many proteins, RNA transcripts, or other biomolecules with single-cell resolution. The data can be used to spatially profile all the cells in a tissue, forming a cell atlas that can reveal novel biological mechanisms and act as a reference map for future work. While technologies today are not yet able to identify every molecule within biological tissue, future advancements will continue to raise the ceiling of what is possible through spatial biology experiments.
With so much potential, single-cell spatial biology technologies are poised to become an integral aspect of life sciences labs in the future. By producing big, high-quality data, these technologies will provide scientists of the future with a new and more informed lens through which to interpret their research.
Let’s consider two ways to approach understanding a complex biological system. Taking a macroscopic biological system as an analog, we could work towards understanding an ecosystem like the rainforest from the bottom up, one plant species at a time, carefully investigating how each plant grows and interacts with the surrounding environment. On the other hand, we could work from the top down by looking at the ecosystem as a whole and then honing into how the ecosystem is constructed from the constituent plant species. In the first approach, although you have a thorough understanding of individual components of the system, it is difficult to piece together their complex interactions. In the second, it’s difficult to understand how each plant species then contributes to the overall ecosystem. Neither approach directly provides the full picture; instead, simultaneously capturing enough information about all organisms in the ecosystem to understand the function of each may yield more direct understanding.
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