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TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Volumetric Imaging of Whole Organs, Organisms, and Multi-cellular Communities

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Paula Montero Llopis

Paula Montero Llopis

Harvard Medical School, Department of Microbiology

Paula Montero Llopis is the Director of Microscopy Resources on the North Quad (MicRoN) Core Facility at Harvard Medical School. Her graduate and postdoctoral studies focused on developing imaging tools to understand the molecular mechanisms by which cells achieve their intricate internal organization. She received her PhD in 2011 from Yale University in the laboratory of Christine Jacobs-Wagner, studying the organization of the flow of genetic information in bacteria. She worked as a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow in David Rudner’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where she studied the molecular mechanisms by which bacterial cells are organized internally, specifically how they organize and segregate their chromosomes. Her current position as the MicRoN Core Director allows her to share her expertise in quantitative light microscopy, facilitating research in a broad range of disciplines, including bacterial cell biology, host-pathogen interactions, and neurobiology. She also assists trainees in tool development to investigate human disease, tissue architecture, and transcriptomics, in addition to whole organ or organism imaging in both live and optically cleared samples. Her passion is to train researchers in the fundamentals of quantitative microscopy and to help them improve data collection, rigor, and reproducibility in image-based science.  

Rebecca Senft

Rebecca Senft

Broad Institute

Rebecca Senft is a postdoctoral research associate in Dr. Beth Cimini's lab in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute. For her PhD, she studied the axonal projections of serotonin neurons in the mouse brainstem in Dr. Susan Dymecki's lab at Harvard Medical School. Through her PhD work, she developed skills in microscopy and image analysis that she now leverages to make these quantitative techniques more accessible to scientists with a background in biology  

Collection Overview

Tissue sectioning techniques are commonly used in research to extract information about cellular components and their spatial distribution or relationships from a thin two-dimensional space. However, most components in any complex biological system, such as organs, cannot be contained within this two-dimensional space. Therefore, this approach compromises the understanding of the spatial relationships among cellular components. Thus, volumetric imaging of whole organs and organisms has become the next frontier in biomedical research.

Light absorption and scattering induced by the heterogeneity in refractive indices within tissues and organisms represent some of the challenges in volumetric imaging, negatively affecting light penetration, contrast, and resolution in fluorescence imaging. Innovations in tissue clearing and sample preparation to equilibrate the refractive index throughout the sample have enabled high resolution, volumetric imaging of whole organs, tissues, and multi-cellular communities, using a wide range of imaging modalities, ranging from confocal to light-sheet microscopy. The goal of this collection is to describe advances in these techniques, focusing on sample preparation, optimization, imaging techniques and analysis, and visualization for samples ranging from bacteria and their communities to whole organs and organisms.

Articles

Erosion Identification in Metacarpophalangeal Joints in Rheumatoid Arthritis using High-Resolution Peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography
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Erosion Identification in Metacarpophalangeal Joints in Rheumatoid Arthritis using High-Resolution Peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography

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Cited by 3

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2023

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