Unlocking Cellular Dynamics: Exploring the Cellanome R3200 Platform with Dr. Gary Schroth

Revealing Cellular Choreography: How the Cellanome R3200 Enables Multimodal, Live-Cell Biology at Scale

Understanding how living cells behave, including how they interact, move, sense, respond, and change over time, remains one of the hardest challenges in biology. Most technologies provide only fragments of the story: a static snapshot, a transcriptomic profile, an endpoint assay, or a narrow live-cell window. Dr. Gary Schroth’s presentation highlights how the Cellanome R3200 platform brings these dimensions together, enabling researchers to follow dynamic biology in unprecedented detail.

The result is a new way to study cells: cellular choreography, the full narrative of what cells are doing, how they communicate, how they transition between states, and how those behaviors align with molecular signatures.

A Platform Purpose-Built for Dynamic, Multimodal Biology

The Cellanome R3200 is designed to capture biology in motion. In Gary’s words, it is a “truly breakthrough kind of platform for studying cell biology,” capable of linking:

• Live-cell assays
• Morphological and phenotypic behaviors
• Transcriptome-level information
• CRISPR guide perturbation effects

This combination is rare. In fact, as Gary notes, it may be “one of the only platforms in the world” capable of unifying these modalities within the same experiment.

The advantage is clear: instead of stitching together data from multiple technologies, researchers can now observe what cells do and directly connect those behaviors to molecular mechanisms.

The Genius of Cellanome: Custom, On-Demand CellCage™ Enclosures

At the heart of the platform is a patented photo patterning system that creates biocompatible, semi-permeable CellCage enclosures (CCE) around selected cells in real time, what Gary calls "the genius of Cellanome". Using a digital micro mirror device (DMD), the instrument identifies target cells, illuminates the region around them, and polymerizes walls that confine each cell or group of cells.

What makes the system transformational:

• Enclosures are programmable to any size and shape the experiment requires.
• AI imaging identifies which cells to capture and defines where to build walls.
• The enclosure walls span floor to ceiling but remain permeable to biochemicals, allowing reagents and antibodies to flow through.

“Whatever you can imagine, we can print on the flow cell,” Gary explains. This programmability unlocks a new category of assays that would be impossible on traditional microfluidic or microwell systems.

Supporting the Biology That Matters: Adherent Cells, Native Environments

Most biological models rely on adherent cells, yet most single-cell systems force them into suspension. The R3200 avoids this compromise.

Using fibronectin, PLO-laminin, and other coatings, the platform allows adherent cells to anchor and behave normally. This distinction is particularly important for complex systems such as:

• Neuronal networks
• Glial interactions
• Epithelial models
• Adherent cancer lines
• Stem cell differentiation workflows

This design principle, supporting cells in their native state, is fundamental to the platform’s biological fidelity.

A Universal Toolkit for Cell Biology

The R3200 is built for efficiency. After loading samples and reagents, researchers simply press “Go” and return later, sometimes days later. What emerges is a complete dataset tying each cell’s behavior to its molecular profile. This enables a different category of question: not just what genes are expressed, but what the cells were actually doing before and during that expression.

Gary frames the R3200 as a "universal toolkit" because the same system handles diverse biology: T cells killing targets over hours, iPSCs differentiating into neurons over weeks, CRISPR screens with functional read-outs, co-culture interactions. If the experiment requires linking morphology and function to gene expression, the R3200 was built for it.

With Cellanome and its collaborators presenting more than 15 posters over the past year, the platform is already expanding what’s experimentally possible. Gary describes this as energizing: "It's amazing what people come up with to do with a technology that's so open and customizable as ours is."

Complex Biology, Captured at Scale

One of the strongest demonstrations in Gary’s talk features neurons grown for two weeks on a coated flow cell, forming dense, highly branched networks. Onto this neuronal bed, microglial cells are introduced, which allows the platform to capture dynamic neuron–glia interactions.

In these videos, microglia patrol the landscape, moving, sensing, eating debris, dividing, and even exhibiting behaviors consistent with neuronal pruning. As Gary notes, researchers see behaviors that are usually inferred only from fixed samples. This is a level of throughput and spatial control that has not been practical with previous technologies.

Conclusion: A New Lens on Living Biology

By uniting live-cell imaging, dynamic behavioral assays, and full transcriptomic profiles within programmable microenvironments, Cellanome offers a fundamentally new way to study cells. Scientists can now watch and quantify how cells behave in real time and connect those behaviors to precise molecular states.

For research teams exploring complex biology, the R3200 platform provides a universal, scalable toolkit to do what was previously impossible.