With a dish of cells as a canvas, Anne Carpenter’s collaborators apply layers of color. Each one highlights a different cellular feature: A fluorescent blue dye to stain the nuclei. Orange to label the cell membranes. Red tints on the mitochondria.
This approach, called “Cell Painting,” uses six biological dyes to stain eight major cell structures. Together, they create not just beautiful images, but also a detailed portrait of the cells’ size, shape or morphology, and—if you can read the signs—physiological state. Seeing and interpreting those clues about cellular function is nearly impossible for even the best observer. But where human eyes may struggle to see subtle differences in hundreds of features across thousands of cells, computers can excel—not least because machines are unburdened by hopes, expectations, or assumptions about what the data might, or might not, reveal.
