Exciting with Light
Exciting with Light
Institute of Physics Scotland Public Lectures in Glasgow
Date: Thursday 29 November 2018
Time: 19:00 - 20:30
Venue: Room 257, Kelvin Building, School of Physics and Astronomy
Category: Public lectures
Website: www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/martin/ioplect/
Optogenetics, an exciting new technology that allows us to observe and manipulate the activity of excitable cells, has revolutionised our understanding in fields such as neuroscience and cardio-vascular research.
Optogenetics is a highly interdisciplinary technology that combines genetic expression of light-sensitive ion channels in targeted cells with strategies to deliver light with precise spectral, temporal and spatial properties to those ion channels in order to control cellular function.
In this talk, Dr Caroline Müllenbroich of the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, will discuss cardiac optogenetics and, in particular, will present an all-optical platform developed (with Leonardo Sacconi at LENS in Florence) to monitor and control cardiac rhythm in real-time using a wide-field mesoscope and a digital light projector. This approach can be applied to probe and perturb cardiac electro-physiology under healthy and pathological conditions in whole mouse hearts, for example, to study arrhythmias and strategies for cardiac defibrillation.
Caroline Müllenbroich received her PhD from Stathclyde University and then spent 5 years at the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS) in Florence, Italy developing novel imaging technology applied to neural and cardiac research. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Glasgow working with Jonathan Taylor in the School of Physics & Astronomy and Godfrey Smith from the Institute of Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences on cardiac imaging and manipulation in rodent hearts.