Computational cell biologist Michael Lippincott, a PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, spends his days studying cells, how they approach death, and then how they die.
In his work in the Way Lab, Lippincott often utilizes cell painting, a method that uses fluorescent dye to light up a cell’s parts to more easily show changes. Academics originally honed the technique, but pharmaceutical companies quickly took interest because cell painting can help researchers understand how a drug affects a cell.
“There are many applications for cell painting,” Lippincott says. “This method allows for some creativity in the scientific process because the sky is the limit.”
Not to mention, the paintings themselves are their own works of art.
“They almost look like holiday lights in some paintings,” the researcher says. “Along with the painting, there are gigabytes upon gigabytes of data that different machine learning algorithms can analyze. You start with a cell, and on one side you have art and on the other you have numbers. That duality is really intriguing.”
Lippincott explains the technique, why it can be so helpful to medical researchers, and how the method is evolving.