Scientists Receive Funding to Watch Inflammation in Real Time
Biologists have made incredible discoveries using dead tissues – those that have been extracted from a live biological system, frozen, or fixed with harsh chemicals. While useful, this model doesn’t quite represent living beings and only gives scientists glimpses of biology at one time. Scientists can take multiple samples over a period of time, but this practice can potentially miss out on important phenomena that can’t be captured at a low temporal resolution.
Recently, Biohub announced that it is funding 15 teams to better understand how inflammation and other biological processes happen in real time and across an entire tissue. This spatiotemporal omics approach will help scientists understand what genes, proteins, and metabolites are present and how they change in the course of inflammation or autoimmune disease.
Projects funded include those meant to understand the fundamentals of inflammation and immune regulation while others focus on a specific autoimmune disease.
Omics is the study of the totality of a particular molecule found in a biological sample. These molecules could include all the DNA, all the genes, all the proteins, or all the metabolites found in a sample. A sample could be a cell type, a tissue, or an entire organism. Spatiotemporal means in space and across time. Essentially, spatiotemporal omics is the study of the totality of a type of molecule over time in space in a sample.
Citation
(2026, May 18). Watching inflammation in real time. Biohub. https://biohub.org/blog/biologys-blind-spot/