Date: Thursday, September 26, 2024

Time:  Noon - 1:00 PM MST

Location: PAIS Room 2540 and Zoom.  Zoom link will be listed on 9/26/24 in the email announcement.

Speaker:

Dr. Keith Lidke
Professor, UNM Physics and Astronomy Department

Abstract:

Due to the near transparency of cells, optical imaging is well suited for studying live or intact cells.  Tagging cellular components with fluorophores dramatically extends these capabilities by providing molecular specificity and improved contrast. However, the light microscope is limited by diffraction to ~ 300 nm, whereas many important events for cell function and signaling involve interactions of proteins that occur at the ~ 10 nm scale.  I will discuss methods for circumventing the diffraction limit using single molecule fluorescence imaging and quantitative analyses to extract biologically meaningful information from noisy images.

Biography:

Keith Lidke received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2002. From 2002 to 2005 he worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Thomas Jovin, located at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen, Germany. There, he worked on developing several new techniques for fluorescence microscopy including programmable array microscopy, lifetime imaging, single quantum dot tracking, and super-resolution using blinking probes. After a short post-doc at Sandia National Laboratories (2006-2007), he joined the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of New Mexico where he is currently a professor. His interests include the development of fluorescence techniques for studying cellular organization and dynamics that occur at spatial scales below the diffraction limit.