Fluorescence microscopy has become an invaluable tool in biomedical sciences. Novel imaging modalities have been developed in recent years allowing visualization of biological processes at different levels of complexity from single molecule to whole organism imaging. The advances in microscopy hardware require bioinformatics solutions capable of handling, processing and quantifying increasingly sophisticated imaging datasets. Our laboratory aims to develop and apply advanced fluorescence microscopy and bioinformatics methods for cell culture and 3D tissue imaging in order to investigate virus-host relationships and the molecular basis of the immune response to virus infections within tissues.
Current studies are focused on the immune cell interactions in non-lymphoid tissues such as epithelial tissues and neuroglia, and the local immune response to there. In addition to wide-field fluorescence and confocal laser scan microscopy, we utilize Light sheet microscopy and tissue optical clearing in order to image large tissue volumes, which allows localization of viruses in situ, and facilitates determination of viral tissue and cellular tropisms. Bioinformatics approaches are developed for image processing and data analysis including machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies to enable visualization and multiparametric quantification of large imaging datasets.