Gary Schroth on Connecting Cellular Behavior to the Transcriptome

For decades, biology has been driven by the powerful notion that if we could sequence enough genomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, then we could finally explain the cell. On today’s show, Gary Schroth, the Chief Scientific Officer at Cellanome, argues that something essential was still missing.
Schroth spent nearly two decades at Illumina helping build the sequencing revolution. He has now joined Cellanome to pursue an expanded vision of biology that connects transcriptomics with live-cell imaging. Our conversation centers around two newly released preprints describing the company’s platform and its application to CRISPR screening, where imaging and transcriptomic data are explicitly linked in the very same cells.
“What we show in a few examples in both papers,” Schroth explains, “is that it’s the combination of transcriptome information and imaging information that really gives us the complete story of what that cell is doing.”
That idea—linking what researchers literally see under the microscope with the molecular state of the exact same cell—emerges as the core concept of the interview. Rather than treating imaging and transcriptomics as separate measurements, Cellanome brings them together in a longitudinal workflow where cells can be observed alive over time and then profiled at the transcriptomic level.
“Sequencing has certainly taught us a lot about cells and sort of the parts list inside cells,” he says. “But it doesn’t really explain biology.”
Will this be the next phase of post-genomic biology where the field moves beyond static snapshots toward directly observing cellular function as it unfolds?

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