PRISM: A Plasmid-based Reporter for Intracellular Spectral Microscopy

Abstract

Organelles form an interconnected network whose morphology, positioning and interactions reflect cellular state. However, reproducibly quantifying these organelle phenotypes across large cell populations and diverse cell types remains a significant challenge. Here we present PRISM (Plasmid-based Reporter for Intracellular Spectral Microscopy), a PiggyBac-integrable construct encoding five unique fluorescent organelle reporters for spectral microscopy, with an accompanying modular analysis pipeline. PRISM stably labels the Golgi, peroxisomes, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria and lysosomes in multiple cell types while remaining compatible with additional molecular or functional probes. The workflow extracts over 500 metrics per cell, describing organelle morphology and distribution alongside pairwise and higher-order contacts. We use PRISM to characterise organelle responses to cytoskeletal perturbation, map PI(4)P redistribution during lysosomal damage, and reveal how Zika virus remodels the organelle landscape during infection. PRISM provides a reproducible approach for investigating organelle network remodelling across biological contexts