About VOLUMINEX
Spatial mapping of biomolecules in tissues is key to understanding everything from fundamental biology to applications in health and disease.
Human cells can encode tens of thousands of messenger RNAs, and the capability to effectively characterize this diversity in 3D is still limited today. Morover, to perform molecular mapping, current technologies are based on high tech instrumentation, lithography, tissue sectioning, and/or advanced fluorescence microscopy.
The goal of our project is to upend the paradigm of imaging with expensive instrumentation and replace it with off-the-shelf reagent kits, sequencing, and software to produce a fully capable 3D molecular imaging technology.
The science driving our initiative comes from the fledgling field of sequencing-based microscopy (known also as DNA microscopy, network-based imaging, or imaging-by-sequencing). The idea is to use packets of DNA as voxels to capture information about the molecular composition at each location of the sample. By constructing a 3D network of such voxels, we are able to use sequencing to infer the spatial structure of the sample without the need for microscopy.
