Strength in numbers: Unleashing the potential of trans-scale scope AMATERAS for massive cell quantification

Singularity biology is a scientific field that targets drastic state changes in multicellular systems, aiming to discover the key cells that induce the state change and investigate the mechanisms behind them. To achieve this goal, we developed a trans-scale optical imaging system (trans-scale scope), that is capable of capturing both macroscale changes across the entire system and the micro-scale behavior of individual cells, surpassing the cell observation capabilities of traditional microscopes. We developed two units of the trans-scale scope, named AMATERAS-1 and -2, which demonstrated the ability to observe multicellular systems consisting of over one million cells in a single field of view with sub-cellular resolution. This flagship instrument has been used to observe the dynamics of various cell species, with the advantage of being able to observe a large number of cells, allowing the detection and analysis of rare events and cells such as leader cells in multicellular pattern formation and cells that spontaneously initiate calcium waves. In this paper, we present the design concept of AMATERAS, the optical configuration, and several examples of observations, and demonstrate how the strength-in-numbers works in life sciences.