18932378. SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETERMINING NUCLEIC ACIDS (President and Fellows of Harvard College)

SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETERMINING NUCLEIC ACIDS

Organization Name

President and Fellows of Harvard College

Inventor(s)

Xiaowei Zhuang of Cambridge MA (US)

Kok-Hao Chen of Cambridge MA (US)

Alistair Boettiger of Cambridge MA (US)

Jeffrey R. Moffitt of Cambridge MA (US)

Siyuan Wang of Cambridge MA (US)

SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETERMINING NUCLEIC ACIDS

This abstract first appeared for US patent application 18932378 titled 'SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETERMINING NUCLEIC ACIDS

Original Abstract Submitted

The present invention generally relates to systems and methods for imaging or determining nucleic acids, for instance, within cells. In some embodiments, the transcriptome of a cell may be determined. Certain embodiments are directed to determining nucleic acids, such as mRNA, within cells at relatively high resolutions. In some embodiments, a plurality of nucleic acid probes may be applied to a sample, and their binding within the sample determined, e.g., using fluorescence, to determine locations of the nucleic acid probes within the sample. In some embodiments, codewords may be based on the binding of the plurality of nucleic acid probes, and in some cases, the codewords may define an error-correcting code to reduce or prevent misidentification of the nucleic acids. In certain cases, a relatively large number of different targets may be identified using a relatively small number of labels, e.g., by using various combinatorial approaches.