Expansion Microscopy with Paul Tillberg

Check out the latest (and final) Pathways Podcast featuring graduate students Landon Savoy of  Iowa State University and Kaitlin Alemany of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who attended #cellio2022

This month we try out Microscopya -- an online game where Cell Biology and Gaming Converge. It was created by science artist Beata Mierzwa, a Molecular Biologist and AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador

The Cell Biology Education Consortium is a network of faculty and students incorporating cell culture-based research into the classroom. We speak with Nathan Reyna of Ouachita Baptist University on how this incredible resource was developed, who can use it, and how to join in. 

Manuel Leonetti, group leader in Quantitative Cell Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, is taking the description of “proteins in the wild” a step further with his project called OpenCell.  Through advanced imaging techniques, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, and software engineering, OpenCell is able to measure the quantity and track the position of different proteins in human embryonic kidney cells through time and space. So far, Leonetti says, his group has mapped 1,310 different proteins, which might sound like a lot, but this represents just 7% of the human genome. Visit https://opencell.czbiohub.org/ to learn more. 

Join Mike Lacy, the Curation Manager for Molecular Biology of the Cell journal's Preprint Highlights, and two of MBoC's Early Career Editors for a discussion on how the Preprint Highlights system of article evaluation was developed. Read more in this blog post from Mike: https://www.ascb.org/society-news/introducing-mboc-preprint-highlights/ or visit the journal website curation page here: https://www.molbiolcell.org/curation-tools

Paul Tillberg, now a Janelia Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus, developed the protocol for expansion microscopy with colleagues Ed Boyden, currently a professor at MIT, and Fei Chen, currently a Core Institute Member at the Broad Institute. The method exploits the fact that biological tissue is mostly water, and it is this watery fraction, Tillberg explains, that is replaced by a “swellable hydrogel” that expands the sample to sizes that make it much easier to image with familiar fluorescent tags and standard light microscopy equipment.

Join co-editors-in-chief Kimberly Tanner and Jeff Schinske for the launch of the 20th-anniversary celebration of ASCB CBE--Life Sciences Education journal, which published its first issue in March 2002. 

Valerie M. Weaver, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Bioengineering and Tissue Regeneration in the Department of Surgery. She is the editor for the special issues at Molecular Biology of the Cell on Forces on and Within Cells.

Rebecca Alvania joined the American Society for Cell Biology as the new CEO on January 3, 2022. 

This month on the Pathways Podcast we interview Rose Hendricks, program director for the Society Civic Science initiative, which is based at ASCB. We will discuss her research project “Assessing How Americans Want to Participate in Science.”