UCSF

New technology developments foster new biology. Beginning from the early observation of cells by Robert Hooke and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who figured out how to use optical lenses to achieve high magnification, microscopy has made huge advancement and each single discovery in cell biology has been accompanied with the development of microscopy innovations. Recent advances in microscopy have reached a previously unachievable resolution and acquisition speed, allowing people study the heterogenous cellular phenotypes accurately and efficiently. However, not all questions can be addressed with the existing approaches. For example, what is the single molecule basis of translation, how single ribosome translates; can we combine imaging based technologies with other existing approaches like CRISPR to further speed up cell biology discoveries? All of these questions require further effort to develop suitable imaging based technologies to address and this is what I aim to do during my PhD. In Chapter 2 and Chapter3, I will introduce two newly developed imaging based technologies to address the above mentioned questions and together, these technologies provide new opportunities to further facilitate cell biology researches.