Biology

Dr. Sudip Mondal
The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA

High-resolution imaging of small animal models such as C. elegans, Drosophila larvae, and zebrafish has become an indispensable tool in the study of long-term in vivo neural activities and functional imaging of nervous system. C. elegans with small body size and ability to grow in liquid environment is suitable for opto-fluidic instrumentation and study whole animal neuronal biophysics. Imaging platforms that have been developed for tracking behaviour and cellular processes in C. elegans, lack the ability to track sub-cellular processes that require high spatial and temporal resolutions. In neurons, essential processes such as axonal transport can be studied by acquiring fast time-lapse images of GFP tagged cargo. We have developed an imaging platform to track mitochondrial transport in unanesthetized intact animals that contribute to the long-term mitochondrial distribution in a developing neuronal process. Using a high-speed confocal imaging system we have recorded neuronal activities from C. elegans nervous system. Using this 3D volumetric imaging system we studied functional connections and information flow through the connectome, when the animal is exposed to external stimuli. In my second part of the talk, I will describe a large-scale imaging platform to enable both high-throughput and high-resolution imaging of multiple C. elegans populations. This platform can image 15 z-stacks of ~4,000 C. elegans from 96 different populations using a single chip with a micron resolution in 16 min. Using this platform, we screened ~1,000 FDA approved drugs in improving the aggregation phenotype of a poly-glutamine aggregation (PolyQ) model to identify possible proteostasis modulators, resulting in potential hits.