[aconz2]

Bit late and I posted essentially this same comment on their site in hopes they'll see it, but this article jumped out at me because a while ago I was thinking about what it would take to get a whole organism single cell atlas so that you could explore it on the computer. The only thing I can really think of is to take a CNC machine, put it in a big freezer, then scan one layer of the specimen with a microscope and whatever multispectral lighting/imaging you need, then mill away a layer and repeat. Pathology slides are prepared with stains to enhance the contrast of membranes and other features which is probably not an option in the frozen state, so that's a big hurdle, but maybe you can do it with some fancy multispectral imaging. And if you can't, maybe you can at least start with lower resolution structures like anatomy (though I think there's still contrast challenges for that). I know there are some single cell atlas efforts for parts of or whole brains for mice and maybe other organs, but like the author's dream idea of getting order thousands of specimens to study variation, it would be great dataset if you could capture everything in one go.

[kaikai]

This exists! They’re called knife-edged scanning microscopes.

[aconz2]

Wow thanks for the info! This was a good overview of one system https://academic.oup.com/mt/article/25/4/14/6815410 - 5um slice thickness at 0.7um per pixel and ~1 TB/cm^3, max sample size 50x50x20mm. Humans are about 75k cm^3 so a 75 PB scan isn't impossible. Probably start with a coarser scan and work on the compression algorithms. "Just" need a (much) bigger scanner. And figure out if the knife edge is okay with bones!