Fluorescence Reimagined: Improving Imaging with Chemistry

Founded in 2001 by Fei Mao and Vivien Chen, Biotium has become a mainstay of high-performance fluorescent reagents for the life sciences. By uniting chemists and biologists, the company continues to engineer reagents optimized for clarity, reproducibility, and emerging techniques.

In this Innovation Spotlight, Lori Roberts, the director of bioscience at Biotium, discusses the past, present, and future of the company, highlighting their mission rooted in direct communication with researchers and scientific curiosity.

Could you share the story behind Biotium’s founding and what inspired its mission to innovate fluorescence technology?

Biotium was founded in the early 2000s, but the concept for the company began to take shape years earlier. Our leadership team spent decades in the biotech industry designing fluorescent dyes before launching Biotium. This includes prior experience working at Molecular Probes and contributing to the development of the well-known Alexa Fluor^® dyes.

During those years, our founders and research and development (R&D) leads were constantly collaborating with fellow biologists and biochemists and learning more about the interplay between their fields. That work made clear how important it is to have a deep understanding of how biology informs chemistry and vice versa. This belief that cross-disciplinary collaboration leads to better tools and better science is a major inspiration for Biotium, and it remains central to our culture today.

Collaboration among chemists, biochemists, and biologists enables us to innovate faster and design reagents that address real experimental challenges. A great example of this is our early product line, the CF^® Dyes. Shortly after Biotium was founded, the original team developed the novel chemical modifications that improved long-standing issues with earlier dyes, including solubility, photostability, and nonspecific background in biological samples. Those improvements are why CF^® Dyes are recognized for their brightness, photostability, lower background, and biocompatibility. Over the years, we’ve expanded that collection to dozens of dyes, making ours the widest selection of near-IR dyes currently available. This includes some specially designed for super-resolution imaging and in vivo applications.

Not all CF^® Dyes share the same chemical modifications. Each dye is individually optimized for its spectral channel and application needs. That kind of meticulous, application-driven approach is really core to our philosophy. We want to design fluorescence tools that make data more accurate, experiments more reproducible, and imaging clearer for researchers across a wide range of biological research applications.

How has the scientific expertise of Biotium’s team shaped the company’s approach to product development?

Our love of innovation is what drives our R&D scientists. Our team is a blend of synthetic chemists, biologists, and bioconjugation chemists who bring complementary perspectives to product design. This diversity of training creates a highly collaborative environment, one where chemistry and biology inform each other at every stage of innovation. This allows us to do things like quickly refine molecular structures in ways that actually matter for experimental performance. The close communication between teams enables faster, more meaningful innovation and ensures that every new reagent solves a genuine research challenge.

Another major part of our process is staying close to our customers. Our R&D and technical support scientists regularly talk directly with researchers to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and what challenges they’re facing in the lab. Those conversations guide a lot of our decision-making.

What are some of the company’s greatest strengths?

I’d say one of our biggest strengths is our culture, which is collaborative, curious, and very hands-on. Another is our ability to respond quickly to our customers’ needs. We’re small enough to stay nimble, which means that ideas don’t have to work their way through layers of bureaucracy. If a researcher provides feedback at a conference or through Tech Support, our R&D team often discusses it at their next meeting.

That agility lets us innovate quickly and in ways that are directly shaped by what scientists are asking for. It also gives us room to explore creative ideas simply because they might solve an interesting problem. Our chemists and biologists work side by side, and they’re constantly tackling niche challenges that might be overlooked by companies more focused on large market opportunities.

That combination of scientific curiosity and close connection to our users lets us respond to emerging needs faster than bigger suppliers can.

Which unmet needs in life science research have Biotium’s products tackled over the years?

As I mentioned earlier, many of Biotium’s most impactful innovations began with researchers sharing real challenges that they faced at the bench. Because we stay so connected to the scientific community, we’re able to turn that feedback into real solutions pretty quickly.

A great example is our CytoLiner™ Fixed Cell Membrane Stains. Researchers told us that the available membrane dyes performed poorly in formaldehyde-fixed samples. That’s a common problem, but no one has solved it. So, our chemists engineered CytoLiner™ Dyes specifically to give bright, selective membrane staining in fixed samples, filling a real gap for imaging workflows and improving imaging consistency for countless researchers.

Another example is our NucView^® Caspase-3 Substrates. Before NucView^®, most apoptosis assays were indirect or endpoint-based. We wanted something that could measure caspase activity in live cells in real time without disrupting cell integrity. The result was a first-of-its-kind reagent that’s now widely used for apoptosis studies.

As instrument capabilities evolve for expanded multiplexing, we try to stay a step ahead to provide new dyes to work with them, such as our near-infrared (near-IR) CF^® Dyes for newer near-IR laser lines and detectors. We’re working every day to expand the near-IR options for nuclear stains, membrane stains, and other probes. In addition, near-IR CF^® Dyes have addressed several limitations in deep-tissue and in vivo imaging. They’re designed for improved biocompatibility and extend the utility of fluorescence into deeper biological contexts. We’ve also expanded our CF^® Dye options across the spectrum to provide more options for high-plex spectral flow cytometry.

How does Biotium view its role within the broader life sciences community?

We see ourselves as collaborators in our customers’ research and discoveries. Every reagent we develop is designed to give researchers clearer data and deeper insight into biological systems. Because we stay closely connected to our customers, we can quickly innovate in response to new methods, technologies, and challenges.

Increasingly, we’re extending that collaboration outward. We’re actively seeking partnerships with academic and industry researchers working in emerging fields, including super-resolution microscopy, organoid models, and expansion microscopy. These partnerships allow us to integrate new technologies that we can’t replicate in-house. It allows us to keep pushing fluorescence technology forward while supporting rapidly expanding fields.

What are some emerging trends in fluorescence and molecular biology that Biotium is particularly excited to contribute to in the coming years?

We’re especially excited about everything happening in super-resolution and spatial imaging. As researchers push the limits of what they can visualize, there’s a growing need for dyes and reagents that can keep up in terms of penetration, precision, and sensitivity.

For example, several of our CF^® Dyes were engineered specifically for super-resolution techniques such as stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) and stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy. These dyes have exceptional photostability and photoswitching behavior, which is crucial for multicolor STORM imaging. Our near-infrared CF^® Dyes also continue to be a big area of growth, as they enable deeper tissue imaging with less autofluorescence. They’re ideal for applications like in vivo imaging and imaging in 3D model systems, such as organoids.

Spatial biology is another area where we see a big opportunity, as the ability to detect spatially distributed molecules with high fidelity is key. Our TyraMax™ Amplification Dyes are designed for tyramide signal amplification (TSA) and cyclic immunofluorescence (CycIF) protocols, enabling ultra-sensitive labeling of low-abundance targets. This makes them invaluable for spatial transcriptomics and multiplexed fluorescence assays.

We’re also seeing growing demand for tools that improve the clarity and specificity of extracellular vesicle (EV) imaging. Traditional membrane dyes often aggregate or nonspecifically label debris, complicating EV detection. Our ExoBrite™ True EV Membrane Stains were designed to solve those issues, providing clean, selective labeling of intact vesicles without the background artifacts that plague earlier dye chemistries. They deliver the kind of clarity researchers need for reliable EV analysis across microscopy and flow cytometry platforms.

Another area of innovation is our MiniMab™ Single-Domain Antibody reagents. These compact, stable antibody fragments combine high affinity and specificity with smaller size. This results in faster staining, deeper tissue penetration, and greater solubility than conventional antibodies. They’re particularly well-suited for high-resolution and quantitative imaging applications.

What else would you like The Scientist’s readers to know?

I’d encourage any researchers with unique imaging or assay challenges to connect with us. Several of our most successful products started as conversations with scientists who were struggling with a particular reagent or technique. Whether it’s improving a classic reagent or pioneering a new technique, our goal remains the same: to make fluorescence research clearer, safer, and more effective through collaboration and scientific curiosity.