[Promotion] Magnify × syGlass: See Your 3D Data the Way It Was Meant to Be Seen
If you’ve run a Magnify experiment, you know the moment. You’ve expanded your tissue 4–11×, stained it post-expansion, and imaged it on your confocal. Hours of acquisition. Gigabytes of fluorescence data. Nanoscale resolution. Then you open the file in Fiji—and you’re scrolling through Z-slices.
Expansion microscopy doesn’t produce data that’s really 2D at any scale. An expanded cortical column isn’t a stack—it’s a volume you could walk into. Most of the tools we reach for weren’t built for that.
Which is why we’re partnering with syGlass.
Why syGlass, why now
We’ve been using syGlass internally on our own R&D—whole-organ expansions, thick brain slabs, large tissue volumes—and it’s the first visualization platform that actually matches the shape of the data our kits generate. Built by IstoVisio (a West Virginia University spinoff, now deployed at 100+ research institutions including Harvard and Johns Hopkins APL), syGlass is volumetric rendering software designed from scratch for multi-terabyte biological imaging.
Here’s what makes it the right fit for Magnify:
It’s built for data at this size. Expansion inflates not just resolution but raw file size. A 1 mm³ region at ~8× linear expansion becomes a gel the size of a marble, imaged at sub-diffraction resolution—volumes in the hundreds of GB to multi-TB range are routine. syGlass renders that natively, with an engine tested on datasets up to 16 TB. No preprocessing, no downsampling.
Real 3D, on a monitor or in VR. You don’t need a headset. Desktop mode alone is a significant upgrade over stack-scrolling—rotate freely, adjust transfer functions in real time, fly a camera path through the volume. Plug in nearly any consumer VR headset and you’re literally standing inside your sample. Stereoscopic vision makes overlapping structures legible in ways a flat screen cannot. And now, you can even interact with your data on the Sony Spatial Reality Display for a glasses-free 3D experience.
Annotation and segmentation where it matters. syFind, their built-in neural network for automated cell detection in fluorescence volumes, is useful when a single expanded organ contains more cells than you’d count by hand in a lifetime. Manual segmentation in VR is fast because you can reach out and paint structures directly. And there’s a Python API if you want to slot syGlass into an existing analysis pipeline.
Outputs that work for publication. Flythrough videos, rotating 3D figures, scalebar-accurate renderings—the kind of supplementary material reviewers increasingly expect for 3D work, and the kind that actually communicates what expansion microscopy does.
What we use it for
Day to day, our team runs syGlass for:
QC on whole-organ expansions. Artifacts that hide in a max-projection—uneven swelling, staining shells, focal distortions—jump out in 3D. Five minutes in syGlass can save a week of downstream analysis on a bad sample.
Deciding where to zoom. Scan the full expanded volume in syGlass, flag regions of interest, then come back for high-resolution follow-up imaging where it matters.
Figures and talks. A rotating 3D render of an expanded structure reads instantly to an audience. A Z-slice flipbook doesn’t.
Multi-channel exploration. Real-time LUT adjustment on 3+ channel stains is dramatically faster than the Fiji toggle-and-wait loop.
The promotion offers
We’ve put together a promotion package specifically for Magnify users who want to use syGlass on their own data:
Special discount on a perpetual syGlass license. Contact us for current pricing; multi-seat and group licenses are available.
3 months of free Magnify refills—one full 20-reaction set per month, 60 reactions total.
Joint technical support. Protocol questions to us, software questions to the syGlass team; we coordinate on the handoff so you’re not routing tickets.
Who this is for
If your Magnify work involves whole organs, thick slabs, tiled volumes, or any experiment where the 3D architecture is the answer—this partnership was built for you.
We’ll walk you through the offer, answer questions about your specific experiments, and help you figure out whether syGlass is the right next tool for your lab.
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