Improvements to biological imaging technology are often driven by the quest for ever greater spatial and temporal resolution – in other words to observe samples with more detail and faster – and indeed recent years have seen a revolution in techniques such as super-resolution microscopy. However, many fields of biology can instead benefit from imaging which is lower resolution, but able to capture the entire 3D volume of larger biological specimens, in the size range of millimeters to centimeters. Similarly, live time-lapse imaging of morphogenesis is a “Holy Grail” of the field, but in many cases the technical difficulties are as much about biological culturing technology, as about imaging itself, and finding good solutions is sometimes impossible. Here I will provide examples of imaging projects to understand vertebrate limb development, in which we use new imaging technologies (optical projection tomography, OPT, and selective plane illumination microscopy, SPIM) to go the “wrong way” – to switch from high resolution to low, and from dynamic imaging to static.


Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 12:00. Seminar Room

Hosted by Prof. Turgut Durduran