Computer Intergrated Systems for Microscopy & Manipulation

Principal Investigator: Fred Brooks, Jr., Mary Whitton 
Funding Agency: National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
Agency Number: 2-P41-EB002025-26A1

Abstract:

The hallmarks of life - motility, adaptation and replication - occur because molecules as Individuals and organized into cells and tissues, generate and respond to forces. The coordinated activity of thousands of molecular motors within single cells oscillates cilia to cause the flow of the pulmonary barrier fluid over long distances. Infection, Inflammation, and metastasis involve the motility of single cells moving through internal changes of shape with forces pushing against their own membranes, peeling, pulling, and rolling with specific proteins in the lumen of blood vessels, or propelled by poymerization of molecular units. Replication involves the wholesale rearrangement of chromosomes through the mitotic spindle, generating forces to organize the chromosomes along the midplate, sensing forces to pass through the checkpoint to finally pull the kinetochores poleward with polymerization forces. Over the past decade the advances in structure identification through genomics and proteomics has been matched by exquisite tools for understanding function through forces. The goal of our resource is to develop force technologies to be applied over a wide range of biological settings, from the single molecule to the tissue level, with integrated systems that orchestrate facile control, multimodal imaging and analysis through visualization and modeling. The individual collaboration projects that steer our technology development cover a wide range of phenomena in molecular biophysics, cell biology and biomedical science. They cover length scales ranging from single molecule (mucin, myosin, MutS) to macromolecular complexes (fibrin fibers, viruses), cells (Plexin, cell motility, cell division), tissue cultures (human lung cell cultures) and macroscopic biomaterial properties (mucusrheology).