“All-optical Super-resolution Imaging of Molecules in their Nanoscale Cellular Context”

Joerg Bewersdorf, Ph.D.
Professor of Cell Biology and of Biomedical Engineering
Yale School of Medicine
 

ABSTRACT
Super-resolution optical microscopy has become a powerful tool to study the nanoscale spatial distribution of proteins of interest in cells over the last years. Imaging these distributions in the context of other proteins or the general cellular context is, however, still challenging. I will present recent developments of our lab which tackle this challenge: 4Pi-SMS microscopy simultaneously localizes up to three species of proteins with sub-10 nm localization precision in 3D. A new fluorogenic DNA-PAINT probe enables fast, 3D whole-cell imaging without the need for optical sectioning, adding a versatile tool to the toolbox of single-molecule super-resolution probes. Labeling proteins and other cellular components in bulk in our recent pan-Expansion Microscopy method provides ultrastructural context to the nanoscale organization of proteins, replacing complex correlative light/electron microscopy by an all-optical imaging approach.
 

BIOGRAPHY
Joerg Bewersdorf is a Professor of Cell Biology and of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. He received his Master's degree (Dipl. Phys., 1998) and his doctoral degree in physics (Dr. rer. nat., 2002) training with Dr. Stefan W. Hell at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. After 4 years at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, he relocated his research group to Yale University in 2009. An optical physicist/biophysicist by training, Dr. Bewersdorf has been a long-time contributor to the field of super-resolution light microscopy development and the application of these techniques to cell biological questions.
 

Faculty Host: Shu Jia, Ph.D.