Cellular and Molecular Biology

Thursday 6/10/22 h. 12:00 am  - Lecture
Ludovico Silvestri, LENS (European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy) and University of Florence, Italy

Adaptive and smart light-sheet microscopy: a dimensional leap in neuroscience and biology

Traditionally, histological analysis of biological samples involved tissue slicing followed by pure 2D reconstructions. This sampling strategy wastes a lot of precious information about the molecular and cellular architecture of the specimen and can introduce biases due the choice of slice and of the cut orientation. In this scenario, light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM), coupled with chemical clearing of tissue, surged as a potential game changer allowing full volumetric reconstruction of entire organs with sub-cellular resolution. However, despite the great promise hold by this method, its routine use is still often limited to the production of a couple of fancy 3D renderings without any real biological insight. In this talk, I will analyze the optical and computational limitations of state-of-the-art LSFM, and discuss our recent advances to achieve scalable, robust, and quantitative analysis of macroscopic tissue samples. Finally, I will describe some applications of this “adaptive and smart” microscopy, from the dissection of brain-wide circuits involved in fear memory to the architectural analysis of the Broca’s area in the human brain, to 3D analysis of surgical specimens which could prospectively improve diagnostic accuracy.

Host: Annalisa Buffo/Roberta Parolisi | webex link