The award recognizes Zhuang for her revolutionary work in super-resolution imaging technologies

Since the late 16th century, scientists have been eager to study the internal structures that run our cells.

But they bumped up against a stubborn barrier, the physical limit of light (known as the "diffraction limit"), until Xiaowei Zhuang, the David B. Arnold Professor of Science, pioneered a new imaging method that overcame that barrier and not only revealed never-before-seen cellular structures but their elusive functions, too.

Today, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) announced that Zhuang is the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, which is awarded to one outstanding biomedical scientist each year. The FNIH chose Zhuang, in part, because of her invention of a super-resolution imaging method called Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM). The tool's nanometer-scale resolution made it possible to visualize the positioning of molecules in a cell, their interactions, and even the 3D spatial organization of distinct types of cells in tissues.

“Dr. Zhuang’s innovative work has transcended the spatial resolution limit of light microscopy, breaking boundaries that scientists were formerly unable to cross in their exploration of biological systems,” said Maria C. Freire, Ph.D., President and Executive Director of the FNIH in a press release. “The ability to visualize molecular interactions and networks inside the cells could lead to the discovery of new cellular processes and potentially revolutionary therapeutic interventions.”

While STORM provided the first high-resolution, genomic scale observations of individual molecules in cells, another Zhuang lab invention, MERFISH, provided a single-cell transcriptome and genome imaging method to capture thousands of genes simultaneously in one image.

So far, Zhuang has used MERFISH to identify novel types of neurons in mouse brains and traced connections between neural cell structures and behaviors. The Human Cell Atlas project, an international effort to catalog human cell types, relies on MERFISH as a key tool to accelerate research.

Most recently, Zhuang and her lab invented a new method to take 3D images of both chromatin structure and function at the same time; now, she and her team can start to unravel how and why one influences the other. They also designed DNA helicopters to record molecular motors and a fluorescence imaging method to visualize the positions of more than 1,000 loci across the human genome, which could help determine how genome organization affects gene-expression patterns in different cell types.

“I am very excited and grateful to receive the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences. It is a great honor to join the group of distinguished scientists who have previously won this prize,” said Zhuang in a press release. “The award recognizes not only the impact members of my lab made on biomedical research but also, importantly, the approach of using physical and quantitative methods to study biological systems, an approach that is used by increasingly more scientists worldwide.”

The Lurie Prize includes a $100,000 honorarium made possible by a donation to the FNIH by philanthropist Ann Lurie, President of the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Foundation and President of Lurie Holdings, Inc.

The FNIH serves to accelerate biomedical research and strategies against diseases and health concerns in the United States and across the globe.