Extensible Immunofluorescence (ExIF) accessibly generates high-plexity datasets by integrating standard 4-plex imaging data

作者：Ihuan Gunawan, Felix V Kohane, Moumitha Dey, Kathy Nguyen, Zheng Ye, Daniel Neumann, Fatemeh Vafaee, Erik Meijering, John G. Lock · 发表于：Nature Communications · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s41467-025-59592-7 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Cell Image Analysis Techniques、Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics、Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques

Standard immunofluorescence imaging captures just ~4 molecular markers (4-plex) per cell, limiting dissection of complex biology. Inspired by multimodal omics-based data integration approaches, we propose an Extensible Immunofluorescence (ExIF) framework that transforms carefully designed but easily produced panels of 4-plex immunofluorescence into a unified dataset with theoretically unlimited marker plexity, using generative deep learning-based virtual labelling. ExIF enables integrated analyses of complex cell biology, exemplified here through interrogation of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), driving significant improvements in downstream quantitative analyses usually reserved for omics data, including: classification of cell phenotypes; manifold learning of cell phenotype heterogeneity; and pseudotemporal inference of molecular marker dynamics. Introducing data integration concepts from omics to microscopy, ExIF empowers life scientists to use routine 4-plex fluorescence microscopy to quantitatively interrogate complex, multimolecular single-cell processes in a manner that approaches the performance of multiplexed labelling methods whose uptake remains limited.