Conferència: "From Microscopy to Nanoscopy: Looking at the Nanoworld at the Single Molecule Level", a càrrec del Dr. Lorenzo Albertazzi

El dimarts 14 de novembre a les 15:00, Dr. Lorenzo Albertazzi, director del Nanoscopy for Nanomedicine Group de l'Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) farà la conferència de Sant Albert 2017 que porta per títol "From Microscopy to Nanoscopy: Looking at the Nanoworld at the Single Molecule Level" a l'Aula Màster de l'edifici A3 al Campus Nord de la UPC.

Abstract

The field of microscopy has been revolutionized in the last decade with the advent of novel techniques able to break previous resolution limits and access the nanometer scale – i.e. we are living a transition from MICROscopy to NANOscopy. This is exemplified with the two recent nobel prizes in chemistry awarded to microscopy: the 2014 for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy and the 2017 for developing cryo-electron microscopy.

Here I will discuss the technological advances that made this possible and the implications for various field of research such as cell biology, structural biology, nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

Moreover, I will show the latest results of our research group on the application of Nanoscopy to Nanomedicine. In this framework the main aim of our group is to use advanced microscopy techniques to understand the interactions of nanomaterials with living matter and to exploit this information to design novel devices for biomedical applications with a particular focus on drug delivery. To this goal we employ innovative optical imaging techniques such as stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) and point accumulation for imaging in nanoscale topography (PAINT) and correlative light-electron microscopy (CLEM).

This allows to get a closer “look” at the behavior of synthetic materials inside human cells and paves the way towards the “microscopy-guided” design of novel nanomaterials medical applications.

TEM image of novel self-assembled nanofibers synthesized in the group