Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Comment
  • Published:

A Cell Observatory to reveal the subcellular foundations of life

Nature Methods (2024)Cite this article

Subjects

Imaging the 4D choreography of subcellular events in living multicellular organisms at high spatiotemporal resolution could reveal life’s fundamental principles. Yet extracting these principles from petabyte-scale image data requires fusing advanced light microscopy and cutting-edge machine learning models with biological insight and expertise.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: From imaging to understanding: AI as a tool to unravel the complexity of living systems.

References

  1. Prakash, K., Diederich, B., Heintzmann, R. & Schermelleh, L. Philos. Trans. Roy. Soc. Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 380, 20210110 (2022).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Stelzer, E. H. K. et al. Nat. Revs. Methods Primers 1, 73 (2021).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Zalejski, J., Sun, J. & Sharma, A. J. Imaging 9, 192 (2023).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  4. Chong, S. et al. Science 361, 378 (2018).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Chen, B.-C. et al. Science 346, 1257998 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  6. Liu, T.-L. et al. Science 360, eaaq1392 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  7. Ruan, X. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.12.31.573734 (2024).

  8. Schneider, E., Robertson, B., Kuhn, A., Lux, C. & Nienhaus, M. Parallel Comput. 107, 102809 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Wolny, A. et al. eLife 9, e57613 (2020).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  10. Vaswani, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 (2017).

  11. Dosovitskiy, A. et al. In International Conference on Learning Representations Conference Proceedings (2021); https://openreview.net/pdf?id=YicbFdNTTy

  12. Kirillov, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.02643 (2023).

  13. Weissman, T. A. & Pan, Y. A. Genetics 199, 293–306 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  14. Zhanghao, K. et al. Preprint at ResearchSquare https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1686675/v1 (2022).

  15. Li, Z., Zhang, Y., Wu, J. & Dai, Q. Nat. Methods 20, 958–961 (2023).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the many colleagues who critiqued and help hone this Comment, but I am particularly indebted to Gokul Upadhyayula, assistant professor and director of the Advanced Bioimaging Center (ABC) at UC Berkeley, for visionary discussions and for his patience in teaching this old dog some new tricks. E.B. is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) with additional support from the Eugene D. Commins Chair in Experimental Physics at UC Berkeley. Additional funding for the ABC comes from the Philomathia Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric Betzig

  2. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric Betzig

  3. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric Betzig

  4. Advanced Bioimaging Center, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric Betzig

  5. Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric Betzig

  6. Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA

    Eric Betzig

Authors
  1. Eric Betzig
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eric Betzig.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

E.B. is inventor or co-inventor of the following relevant US patents: patents 7,894,136, 8,711,211 and 9,477,074, licensed to Carl Zeiss Microscopy; and patents 9,500,846 and 10,051,240, assigned to HHMI. E.B. is also a cofounder of Eikon Therapeutics.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Methods thanks Philip Hockberger and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Betzig, E. A Cell Observatory to reveal the subcellular foundations of life. Nat Methods (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02379-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02379-3

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing AI and Robotics

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics newsletter — what matters in AI and robotics research, free to your inbox weekly.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics