Scientists Improve Contrast In Noninvasive Imaging of Cancer Cells, NUST MISIS reports News provided by Share this article MOSCOW, May 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A Russian-German research team has come up with a new technique for magnetic resonance imaging of cancer cells. The study, published in Pharmaceutics, shows that heterologous expression of encapsulin systems from Quasibacillus thermotolerans with functional cargo proteins and iron transporter leads to increased contrast in MRI imaging of mammalian tumor cells. Currently, the primary method of live-cell imaging is direct labeling of cells with a probe or contrast agent before transplantation. However, any synthetic contrast agent for cell labeling has a critical drawback — it dilutes as the cells divide, which leads to loss of the signal after several cycles of divisions. In contrast, genetically encoded reporters propagate to daughter cells with each cell division. Moreover, their signal is selective for viable cells.