Met een speciale lichtmicroscoop gedetailleerde 3D-opnames maken van eiwitten in levende cellen, zonder die cellen te beschadigen. Dat wil Sjoerd Stallinga, winnaar van een ERC Advanced grant van 2,3 miljoen euro, voor elkaar krijgen. Daarvoor gaat hij samples nanometer voor nanometer scannen met een uitgekiend 3D-lichtpatroon. Een aanpak waarvoor samenwerking tussen verschillende disciplines nodig is.

The European Research Council has awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to Sjoerd Stallinga The European grant enables internationally established research leaders to conduct a five-year research project.

Voltage imaging and optogenetics offer new routes to optically detect and influence neural dynamics. Optimized hardware is necessary to make the most of these new techniques. In this study the Octoscope, a versatile, multimodal device for all-optical electrophysiology is presented. The researchers illustrate its concept and design and demonstrate its capability to perform both 1-photon and 2-photon voltage imaging with spatial and temporal light patterning, in both inverted and upright configurations, in vitro and in vivo.

Jasper van Leeuwen will be working on dielectric active shimming for his thesis at Mars Lab, supervised by David Maresca and Paulina Šiurytė. The goal of the project is to incorporate remote switching in addition to designing, making, and testing a next-generation device, and if time permits, EM simulations.

Recently researchers of the departments Chemical Engineering and Imaging Physics explored and demonstrated the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to measure the spatio-temporal concentration of solute in drying droplets and the development of a solidifying shell at the liquid-air interface, using aqueous droplets of maltodextrin as a model system.

Just before Easter, the Dutch government decided to support the NEXTGEN HIGHTECH programme within the National Growthfund. This is a great boost for the lab of Jacob Hoogenboom and that of Carlas Smith (3mE) to continue their work on electron microscopy, automation, and metrology for life sciences with our partners Technolution Advance, Delmic, and many others.

Anneloes Dijkstra Tyers recently joined ImPhys as Management Assistant. She will be supporting the Microscopy Instrumentation & Techniques group (MInT). Anneloes graduated in 2011 from Van Hall Larenstein in Wageningen with a degree in Regional Development and Innovation.

A paper is out in Physical Review Research by a collaboration between Sjoerd Stallinga and researchers in Grenoble and Gottingen on the question what the best possible transfer function is for a band-limited imaging system such as fluorescence based microscopes.

Koen Jurgens is a Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences Msc student from Utrecht University, track Biophysics & Molecular Imaging. He will 3D print phase plates to engineer the point spread function, and consecutively evaluate the performances to optimize the design of these phase plates. His supervisor is Bernd Rieger.

Uitzaaiingen bij kanker zijn vaak te wijten aan enkele afwijkende cellen. Die gedragen zich agressiever dan de andere kankercellen in een tumor. Miao-Ping Chien en Daan Brinks werken vanuit twee verschillende universiteiten samen aan een methode om die cellen op te sporen. Hun onderzoek is nu gepubliceerd in Nature.