Future directions include integrating CytoTape data with single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics to create multidimensional maps of gene regulatory landscapes across cells and tissues.

The research is framed as a paradigm shift for studying cellular regulation, offering unprecedented weekly-scale temporal insights into transcriptional dynamics in vitro and in vivo.

Demonstrated in mouse neurons, glia, and human-derived cell lines, CytoTape revealed previously unseen temporal modes of regulatory pathways linked to cell plasticity.

CytoTape is a genetically encoded protein tape recorder that continuously records gene regulation dynamics with single-cell spatial and temporal resolution for up to three weeks in living cells.

CytoTape was extended to CytoTape-vivo, enabling weeks-long, spatiotemporally resolved single-cell recording in living mouse brains and capturing promoter-driven gene expression histories across thousands of neurons per animal.

CytoTape-vivo scales to living organisms, providing spatiotemporally resolved recording in mouse brains and chronicling gene expression histories across thousands of neurons over weeks.

Researchers suggest potential applications in distinguishing healthy from diseased brain processes and guiding future therapeutic interventions, with the study published in Nature in 2026.

The design relies on computational modeling to predict robust intracellular assembly with minimal perturbation, and its modular architecture allows expansion to additional regulatory markers.

Potential applications include drug discovery, synthetic biology, and precision medicine by mapping how cells integrate signals over time and guiding feedback-driven cellular programming.

The article previews subscription content and provides supplementary materials detailing development, experimental protocols, datasets, and videos illustrating tissue-wide segmentation and signal extraction from CytoTape-vivo experiments.

The toolkit offers a versatile platform for scalable and multiplexed analysis of cellular processes in vitro and in vivo, with potential applications in neuroscience and gene regulation research.

Analyses show divergent transcriptional trajectories relate to transcriptional history and signal integration, with immediate early genes displaying complex temporal correlations within single cells.