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Nanometre-scale imaging and AI reveal the interior of whole cells

Efforts to generate nanoscale-resolution images of cell interiors have gained ground through the development and refinement of a microscopy method. The data sets are publicly available as resources for further discoveries.
  1. Jason R. Swedlow

    1. Jason R. Swedlow is at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 5EH, UK, and also at Wellcome Leap, Los Angeles, California, USA.

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  2. Lucy Collinson

    1. Lucy Collinson is at the Francis Crick Institute, London NW1 1AT, UK.

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One long-sought goal of cell biology is the full and complete determination of the structure and composition of a single cell. If we could name every molecule that makes up a cell, know each molecule’s location, map how the molecules interact, and understand how they come together to construct organelles and determine organelle function, we would have the building blocks needed to understand cellular physiology. Writing in Nature, Xu et al.1 and Heinrich et al.2 present combined advances in data acquisition and machine-learning (ML)-based analysis in microscopy that move us closer to achieving this objective.

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Nature 599, 39-40 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02776-0

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