Descrizione del progetto
Nuovi strumenti di imaging ottico per studiare i tessuti vivi
Nelle scienze della vita, la valutazione non invasiva delle proprietà meccaniche delle cellule viventi con una risoluzione spazio-temporale simile a quella della microscopia mediante fluorescenza rimane una sfida. Nonostante la sua capacità di sondare le proprietà viscoelastiche di materiali con risoluzione limitata dalla diffrazione in 3D, il tipo di elastografia ottica recentemente sviluppato e chiamato microscopia di Brillouin presenta velocità molto basse, elevata fototossicità e difficoltà di quantificazione. Nel tentativo di superare questi inconvenienti, il progetto Brillouin4Life, finanziato dall’UE, svilupperà tecnologie di imaging ottico uniche e innovative basate sulla microscopia di Brillouin. Queste nuove tecnologie massimizzeranno la velocità, la risoluzione e la penetrazione in profondità, riducendo al minimo il fotodanneggiamento. Il progetto affermerà la microscopia di Brillouin quale strumento rivoluzionario per gli studi di biofisica su tessuti vivi e cellulari.
Obiettivo
A long-standing aim in the life sciences is to understand development and morphogenesis, i.e. how organismal shape is encoded by the genome and how cellular mechanics are involved in its execution. Lately, investigations have started to focus on the mechanical properties of the involved multicellular compartments, and the interwoven mechanical - molecular interactions at the cellular scale. While molecular components can routinely be visualized with fluorescence microscopy, assessing the mechanical properties of living cells with similar spatio-temporal resolution in a non-invasive fashion has long been an open challenge.
Recently, a new type of optical elastography, namely Brillouin microscopy (BM), has emerged as a non-destructive, label- and contact-free technique which can probe visco-elastic properties of materials with diffraction-limited resolution in 3D. Yet, despite ongoing improvements, virtually all current implementations suffer from very low speed, high phototoxicity, and difficulties in quantification, thus prohibiting meaningful investigations in the life sciences.
In this interdisciplinary proposal, my group will develop unique and innovative optical imaging technologies based on BM to overcome its current drawbacks and to establish it as a revolutionary tool for live tissue and cellular biophysics studies. In particular, we will work towards a highly-multiplexed BM with selective-plane illumination to maximize speed, resolution and depth penetration, while minimizing photodamage (Aim 1). At the same time, we will combine BM with other imaging modalities that will allow us to obtain correlative datasets and to accurately quantify the measured mechanical properties (Aim 2). We will then apply these methodological advancements together with fellow biologists to study the role of elasticity in tissue morphogenesis and self-organisation, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the role of biomechanics in developmental biology (Aim 3).
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
69117 Heidelberg
Germania