Notes from USGEB11

USGEB Meeting 2011, Zurich «Imaging Life»

Thursday 27.01.2011

Plenary Lecture I

Seeing Cells in Action with photoactivatable fluorescent Proteins - Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz

Photo-activated light microscopy → Super-resolution

Autophagy → self-destruction of cell

correlative imaging PALM/TEM → map molecules on Electron microscopy images

3D imaging possible

wave from photon is propagated through two objectives

interference makes it possible to extract 3D position

Brain Imaging - Symposium D

Rolf Grütter - Imaging Brain Metabolism

Brain glucose level is linear to plasma glucose

Brain glucose content mapped using 1H NMR

Spectroscopy can be used to emasuera concentration of biochemical compounds

Concentration > 1 MM

water soluble

→ quantitative tool

Corrado Corradi - felt and observed pain...

Analysis of activation patterns of brain regions of observed and experienced pain → localized in one single part of the brain

Beat Riederer - Imaging Brain Protein

Christophe Lamy - Imaging Sodium in Tissue

Exploring Biological Matter by Different Imaging Modalities - Symposium H

C. Cremer Nanoscopy of Nuclear Architecture

distribution of cells in Nucleus → Super-resolution

Merging of several images together

David Müller

AFM imaging

Friday 28.01.2011

Imaging life using PET - Symposium J

Introduction

PET is quantitative, but had only a resolutin in the mm-range

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Windhorst - New PET Pharaceuticals in Oncology

Translational molecular imaging

Molecular labeling with different compounds

Makes personalized treatment possible, but needs testing for treatment with specific FDG-marker

Tony Gee - PET in the CNS

Since markers have short half life, repeated studies are possible

11C has 20min half life

Enzymes can be used, even Cocaine, Heroin and Nicotine. Can even be done without the pharmacological effect, since the markers can be labeled (which destroys the effect?)

For antidepressants, a combination of Pindolol and SSRI was shown to improve onset of action. 70% of 5-HT1A - Receptor has to be occupied by Pindolol.

Surekha Pimple - Evaluation of Quinazoline as PET Tracers

Development and characterization of new tracers for PET imaging

Haibiao Gong - in vigo imaging of xenograft tumors

Near infrared imaging of tumors in vivo, follows by ex vivo imaging of the whole organ and tissue sectioning

Activation of Affibodies could be detected.

Jana Doehner - Role of Reelin in brain tissue

Plays a role in Alzheimer research

Expression of Reelin changes over aging

Similarities between human and mouse plaques

Plenary Lecture

Fritjof Helmchen - Emerging techniques for in vivo imaging of Neural Circuit Dynamics

Neocortex has several layers of neurons until the white matter

Depth penetration into Neocortex around 800 um, into living tissue!

Single action potentials through imaging combined wit electrical recording

Two-photon imaging with 'swinging objective' to cover full ROI

Tradeoff between time resolution and size of Neuron population which can be imaged

Plasticity effect in the brain (due to trimming of whiskers)

Imaging in awake and behaving mice an be done with animals which are trained to tolerate head fixation