Courtesy of Ethan Bier
Ventral (top) and ventro-lateral (bottom) views of Drosophila embryos triple-labeled to visualize expression patterns. The top image (early blastoderm) shows snail (blue), single minded (red), and rhomboid (green); the bottom image (early gastrulation) shows short gastrulation (blue), ventral nervous system defective (green), and intermediate nervous system defective (red). (Reprinted from
Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, recently described a novel combination of new and preexisting technology that permits them to visualize five RNAs simultaneously in a single cell.1 The technique, called multiplex labeling, is a variant of multiplex fluorescent in situ hybridization (M-FISH), and was developed by Dave Kosman, a staff scientist in the laboratories of UCSD biologists Ethan Bier and William McGinnis.
Kosman and coworkers, in collaboration with scientists at Molecular Probes (a division of Invitrogen in Carlsbad, Calif.) used the method to directly detect microRNA in an intact Drosophila embryo, as ...