Awarded in 2017
Home Department: Chemistry
Faculty Advisors: W.E. Moerner (Chemistry) and Jan Liphardt (Bioengineering)

Research Title: Development and Application of a Light Sheet Microscope for 3D Single-Particle Tracking of Chromatin Loci in Thick, Live Mammalian Cells

Research Description: Single-particle tracking (SPT) allows for the full distribution of spatiotemporal behaviors of particles to be observed, revealing dynamics and heterogeneity obscured by ensemble measurements. However, significant fluorescent background has limited SPT studies in the mammalian cell nucleus. Integrating single-particle tracking and optical design with cell biology and fluorescent nanobody array labeling, Petar will develop a novel microscopy platform to perform high-precision 3D SPT in thick, live mammalian cells to quantitatively characterize the motion of chromatin sites such as telomeres, whose malfunction is associated with a change in their dynamics and has been implicated in carcinogenesis and cellular aging.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Petar is a postdoctoral scholar in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley.