> current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time Problem statement. > However, MIT r

> current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time Problem statement. > However, MIT researchers have developed an alternative method that allows them to observe up to seven different molecules at a time That seems… vaguely similar to the problem condition. > a typical light microscope can only distinguish two or three of these colors If you are advancing the state of the art, shouldn’t this read “the highest-performing existing techniques”? What are they leaving out? > In 2020, Boyden’s lab developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell. So it’s from five spread around to seven presumably less spread around, but there must be some resolution issue with overlapping blinking proteins. From what I can tell as an outsider it appears to be an active area of research with a number of proposed solutions for increasing the number of molecules or proteins that can be analyzed at once. This one uses strobing proteins which require post-processing by linear de-mixing and seem like they have twice the noise/error/accuracy issue: wavelength, as with any color-based solution, and switching frequency, which is the novel bit. Superficially it is unclear to me whether it is better than a number of other recent similar papers describing increases in number of molecules monitored at once.