In Vivo Imaging of Cellular Dynamics from the Nanoscale to the Macroscale

Abstract

The hallmark of life is that it is animate. To gain a better understanding of how inanimate molecules assemble to create animate life, it is necessary to image living organisms noninvasively at high resolution in both space and time. However, the imaging of biological specimens involves inevitable tradeoffs of spatial resolution, speed, non-invasiveness, and imaging depth. I will describe three methods that balance these tradeoffs in different ways: structured illumination microscopy at 50-80 nm resolution, which we apply to study endocytic and cytoskeletal dynamics at the plasma membrane; lattice light sheet microscopy, which we use to image the rapid three-dimensional dynamics of single molecules, cells and embryos at hundreds of image planes per second; and adaptive optics, which we use to recover optimal resolution of fine neural processes deep in the brains of zebrafish and mice.