Getting integrated imaging and sequencing per cell off the ground with IRIS took a lot of grind. Countless iterations across every component. šø+š§¬=š
I want to highlight three key craftspeople who built, established, and coded what made IRIS work (preprint at thread end).
Link to preprint: š¦¾
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Building IRIS meant turning a 'simple' idea into an integrated deterministic microfluidic instrument that combines imaging<>transcriptomes per cell. Those five years were full of ā0ā1ā moments; each essential for making IRIS reality.
Nadia Grenningloh | While deterministic barcoding worked well enough for HEK293T cells, performance for PBMCs was initially abysmal - fixed with hard work (Supp. Fig. 2CāJ). The cost: more than 50 non-optimized IRIS runs, each involving >12-hour days.
Camille Lambert | Building the deterministic microfluidics required for precision stopping, cell encapsulation, and droplet sorting did not fall from the sky. It was an iterative process at CMi@EPFL. Iteration #42 finally did the job (Supp. Fig. 2A & 3A).
Today, we use their work every day.
Romina Augustin established well-coding the biochemical foundation that enabled our ādroplet consortiaā.
Katharina Eckstein removed five PCR cycles from the workflow, effectively tripling gene-detection sensitivity.
When IRIS was just a word on a whiteboard, they and many others started building from scratch with (extremely) limited budget. Their hard work was pivotal in getting IRIS off the ground.
#microfluidics #singlecell #phenomics #imaging
Assia Ouanaya automated library-prep steps, saving ~4h per experiment.
Maximilian Kohnen built IRISās first functional custom optics for focal-plane imaging.
@carolinewandinger.bsky.social developed the scRNA-seq mapping and QC pipeline that still runs smoothly every day.
All of these efforts paid off in the end, but at the start, we didnāt know whether any of them would. That is the purpose of research, gunning for the impossible.
#IRIS #singlecell #microfluidics #teamwork
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
