Brain cells don't live alone. They're like residents of the same apartment building: if the neighbors are noisy, it's harder for you to work. It turns out that a cell's ability to repair its DNA (that is, to fix the damage that accumulates with age) depends on who lives nearby.
This discovery changes how we look at brain aging. People used to think that each cell ages on its own. Now it's clear: aging is a neighborhood-wide affair. Perhaps in the future, drugs will target not individual cells but their communities.
MERFISH can simultaneously measure the expression of hundreds of genes in thousands of cells while preserving their exact location in the tissue. It's as if you could eavesdrop on the conversations of every resident of a city without evicting them from their homes.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.