Luis Enrique Villegas-Hernández

Master of science Luis Enrique Villegas-Hernández will Tuesday December 5th, 2023, at 12:15 hold his disputas for the PhD degree in Science. The title of his thesis is:

"Super-resolution histology"

Summary:

Super-resolution optical microscopy (SRM) holds great promise for the advancement of life sciences, unlocking the secrets of the minute machinery composing living organisms. While broadly accepted in cell biology, the existing SRM methods haven’t effectively breached relevant fields such as histological practice, mainly due to the complexity, elevated costs, limited throughput, and incompatibility with conventional sample preparation workflows posed by these novel imaging methods.

This thesis contributes to the adoption of super-resolution histology both in research and clinical settings by shedding light on the practical aspects of tissue super-resolution. Here, two SRM microscopy platforms with good prospects for high throughput imaging of tissues are evaluated: a) a state-of-the-art commercially-available DeltaVision OMX V4 Blaze microscope, supporting multi-color 3D structured illumination microscopy (3D-SIM); and b) a custom-built photonic chip-based microscope, offering a series of high-contrast waveguide-based microscopy modalities including total internal reflection fluorescence (chip-TIRF), and SRM imaging via single-molecule localization microscopy (on-chip SMLM), fluorescence fluctuations-based super-resolution microscopy (on-chip FF-SRM), and correlative light-electron microscopy (on-chip CLEM). Accordingly, to evaluate the SRM imaging capabilities of such microscopy platforms, two distinct histological methods are explored, namely 1) the Tokuyasu cryopreservation; and 2) the formalin-fixation paraffin-embedding (FFPE). These include tissue sections of human and animal origin.

Evaluation committee:

• Professor Gail McConnell, University of Strathclyde, UK, MISU (1. Opponent)
• Professor Muhammad Nadeem Akram, USN Norway (2. Opponent)
• Professor Frank Melandsø, Department of Physics and Technology, UiT (intern member and leader of the committee)

The disputas will be led by Professor John Sigurd Mjøen Svendsen, Department of Chemistry at the Faculty of Science and Technology.

Supervisors:

• Associate Professor Balpreet Singh Ahluwalia, Department of Physics and Technology, UiT (main supervisor)
• Post.doc. Florian Ströhl, Department of Physics and Technology, UiT

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