How do you measure a human cell?

A big step forward towards understanding what makes our cells healthy and what goes wrong in disease – Allen Institute scientists just debuted a new way to measure cell organization. This work will enable the community to ask questions about cell biology that we could never ask before.

Working with hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images of human induced pluripotent stem cells, the team shared in the journal Nature a new mathematical framework to make sense of the shape of our cellular building blocks and their internal organization.

“The way cells are organized tells us something about their behavior and identity,” said Susanne Rafelski, Ph.D., Deputy Director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, who led the study along with Senior Scientist Matheus Viana, Ph.D. “What’s been missing from the field, as we all try to understand how cells change in health and disease, is a rigorous way to deal with this kind of organization. We haven’t yet tapped into that information.”

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