Complex Systems and Biological Physics Seminars

PhenoSeq: simultaneous single cell/single molecule time series in vivo measurements of many strains

by Michael Lawson (Uppsala University)

Europe/Stockholm
112:028

112:028

Description
Molecular biology has been going through a quantitative revolution facilitated by striking advancements in experimental methodology, which has resulted in a proliferation of mathematical models hoping to make biology at the cellular level a rigorous science in the mold of physics. Advances in microscopy have allowed for super resolution localization of molecule locations inside a cell and microfluidic devices have enabled long time courses of observations at the single cell level. At the other extreme, flow assisted cell sorting allows for more coarse measurements, but can be used to get massive amounts of single cell measurements of many strains simultaneously. What is missing, and essential to the advancement of this more rigorous form of biology, is to bridge these two regimes: the ability to make precise localization observations at the single molecule level in individual cells, over long time trajectories for many strains simultaneously. The method we have developed meets this goal by simultaneously accomplishing all of these objectives and thus promises a source of high throughput, precise and highly quantitative data about cellular processes.