How small can you ‘om­ic? New start­up wants to pro­file the tiny space be­tween neu­rons to study Alzheimer’s

Sin­gle cell om­ic star­tups have popped up left and right, promis­ing to im­prove drug dis­cov­ery by pro­cess­ing large amounts of da­ta from an­a­lyz­ing cells one at a time.

But in a re­cent study pub­lished in Na­ture Biotech­nol­o­gy, re­searchers go small­er than a sin­gle cell — map­ping out the RNA tran­scripts con­tained in a sin­gle synapse, or the tiny gap be­tween two neu­rons — and say the ap­proach can be used to study Alzheimer’s and oth­er neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­eases.

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