Biomedical Engineering seminars

UCL Department of Neuroinflammation Seminar by Professor Emad Moeendarbary (Professor of Cell Mechanics and Mechanobiology, UCL Mechanical Engineering) on how biophysical factors such as substrate stiffness and axon geometry regulate oligodendrocyte behavior and myelin formation, presenting the AxoMetic in vitro myelination platform for discovery of remyelinating therapies.

Savina Cammalleri discusses extending DISCO, a digital microfluidic platform for single-cell omics, to protein analysis. The work uses controlled handling of individual cells and samples to make proteomic measurements more efficient and scalable. The presentation considers how a flexible microfluidic approach can support studies of variation between cells and the molecular processes underlying that variation. Its goal is to broaden the experimental tools available for biological measurements at single-cell resolution. Cammalleri is a doctoral researcher in biomedical engineering at the University of Toronto and conducts her research at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences.

Optical imaging is a major research tool in the basic sciences, and is the only imaging modality that routinely enables non-ionized imaging with subcellular spatial resolutions and high imaging speeds. In biological imaging applications, however, optical imaging is limited by tissue scattering to short imaging depths. This prevents large-scale bio-imaging by allowing visualization of only the outer superficial layers of an organism, or specific components isolated from within the organism and prepared in-vitro.

Explore how microfluidic chips can enhance your imaging experiments by increasing control, throughput, or flexibility. In this remote, personalized workshop, participants will receive expert guidance, support and chips to run tests on their own microscopes.

Advancements in imaging speed, depth and resolution have made structured illumination microscopy (SIM) an increasingly powerful optical sectioning (OS) and super-resolution (SR) technique, but these developments remain inaccessible to many life science researchers due to the cost, optical complexity and delicacy of these instruments. We address these limitations by redesigning the optical path using in-line fibre components that are compact, lightweight and easily assembled in a “Plug & Play” modality, without compromising imaging performance. They can be integrated into an existing widefield microscope with a minimum of optical components and alignment, making OS-SIM more accessible to researchers with less optics experience. We also demonstrate a complete SR-SIM imaging system with dimensions 300 mm × 300 mm × 450 mm. We propose to enable accessible SIM imaging by utilising its compact, lightweight and robust design to transport it where it is needed, and image in “unconventional” environments where factors such as temperature and biosafety considerations currently limit imaging experiments.