During his postdoctoral training in Christian Eggeling's lab at University of Oxford, Iztok Urbančič has mastered super-resolution techniques such as STED and FCS and has transferred from our lab to Oxford some important experience in FMS and optical tweezers. He has gained important expertise in working with immune cells, the work of entire consortium including I. Urbančič has been accepted for publication in Nature Immunology (2018, Capturing resting T cells: the perils of PLL). The very tight collaboration between our group (LBF) and Eggeling's lab is reflected also in the joined organisation of Advanced microscopy workshop at Jozef Stefan Insititute in September 2017 and already resulted in STED-related expertise transfer from Oxford group to LBF. Substantial expertise in superresolution imaging techniques, gained from Eggeling's lab, is crucial for the introduction of nonlinear superresolution microscopy to enable imaging of cell interaction with nanomaterials as proven also in the recently submitted joined paper (I.Urbančič as the first author, J.Štrancar as a corresponding author), which is currently under consideration in PNAS.
COBISS.SI-ID: 31228711
The paper deals with prediction of the treatment effects of irreversible electroporation (IRE). IRE is a method for nonthermal ablation of solid tumors. For its success it is extremely important that a coverage and an exposure time of the treated tumor with electric field is within the specified range. Measurement of electric field distribution during the electroporation treatment can be achieved using Magnetic Resonance Electrical Impedance Tomography (MREIT). In the study it is shown that MREIT can enable electroporation monitoring of IRE-treated tumors and also enables prediction of IRE ablated tumor areas during IRE of mouse tumors in vivo. This was achieved by coupling MREIT with the corresponding Peleg-Fermi mathematical model which provides cell death probability in the IRE-treated tumors. This technique can potentially be used in electroporation-based clinical applications, such as IRE tissue ablation and electrochemotherapy, to improve and assure the treatment outcome and also in deep brain stimulation for monitoring of electric field distribution.
COBISS.SI-ID: 11799380
Modulated gradient spin echo (MGSE) sequences are designed to measure frequency dependence of a diffusion constant. It was shown that MGSE sequences are prone to off-resonance effects which lead to an overestimation of the diffusion spectrum at high frequencies. In the study, the origin of the error is analyzed. It is found that complex coherence pathways, that become dominant over the direct coherence pathway at higher off-resonances and are also more diffusion attenuated than the direct pathway are the cause of the error. It is also shown that the error can be significantly reduced if only on-resonance spins contribute to the echo signal from which the diffusion spectrum is calculated. The method was tested on a water filled sample at room temperature which has a flat diffusion spectrum.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30763303
We used our fluorescence microspectroscopy (FMS) and recently developed smart probe to unambiguously determine local pH and concentrations of a potential drug within endosomes of living cells [30835495]. Owing to the sensitive spectral detection, we were able to decouple both otherwise indistinguishable effects on the emitted fluorescence of the probe. We then further upgraded FMS into a super-resolved nanospectroscopy by adding the STED modality and identifying three suitable polarity-sensitive membrane probes [31161127]. The achieved lateral spatial resolution around 70 nm allowed us to track hitherto unobservable structural variations of cellular membranes. The developed technique will open numerous new possibilities to study structures and interactions at the nano-scale.
COBISS.SI-ID: 31161127
Interactive whiteboard (IWB) are today a relatively common educational tool in schools in developed countires. However, it seems that the unique possibilities of IWBs are rarely used to enhance teaching and learning. We investigated what were the crucial elements for a high-school physics teacher to learn and use the IWB in a new way, how she planned and implemented a lesson on motion of planets, a topic that does not allow using real experiments in a classroom, while being able to perform spatial manipulation is of crucial importance. Findings can be transferred to teaching many other topics such as dynamics of particles on a microscopic scales, processes in biological systems, quantum phenomena and more. PAper has been published in A'' journal, treated as outstanding achievement.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3059812