(91g) Towards Holistic Imaging and Rapid Phenotyping of Complex Biological Systems (Invited Speaker)

Holistic measurement of diverse functional, anatomical, and molecular traits that span multiple levels, from cells to an entire system, remains a major challenge in biology. In this talk, I will introduce a series of technologies including CLARITY (Chung, 2013), SWITCH (Murray, 2015), MAP (Ku, 2016), stochastic electrotransport (Kim, 2015), SHIELD (Park, 2019), eFLASH (Yun, 2019), and ELAST (Ku, 2020) that enable integrated multiscale imaging and molecular phenotyping of both animal tissues and human clinical samples. I will discuss how we engineer (1) the physicochemical properties of biological tissues, (2) molecular interactions, and (3) molecular transport all together to achieve integrated organ-wide molecular phenotyping at unprecedented speed and resolution. I will also discuss how these tools can be deployed synergistically to study a broad range of biological questions. We hope that these new technologies will accelerate the pace of discovery in biomedical research.