Tom Kirchhausen

Tom Kirchhausen is an expert on mechanisms of intracellular membrane traffic and a leading authority on the molecular structures and interactions that underlie clathrin-mediated endocytosis. He has help defined the structure, interactions, and assembly-disassembly mechanisms of clathrin and many of its associated proteins, through studies extending over three decades.  His work throughout this time has been characterized by pioneering use of emerging technologies — from the early days of molecular cloning to contemporary live-cell imaging.  He has used the tools of x-ray crystallography, electron cryomicroscopy, and single-molecule biophysics to create a “molecular movie” of clathrin-mediated endocytosis, and he has related these molecular events to functional properties of the surfaces of living cells.

Dr. Kirchhausen will be leading a discussion on Imaging Subcellular Dynamics From Molecules to Multicellular Organisms. Frontier optical-imaging modalities exemplified by the lattice light-sheet microscope invented by Eric Betzig sets new visualization standards for analyzing and understanding sub-cellular processes in the complex and dynamic three-dimensional environment of living-cells in isolation and within tissues of an organism. By using ultra-thin sheets of light to rapidly illuminate biological samples with extremely low photon doses, 3D experiments previously limited to seconds or minutes by photo-bleaching or by photo- toxicity, can now be done at diffraction limited resolution and high-temporal precision with unprecedented duration of minutes or hours. He and his team believe this ability to image with minimal perturbations is ideally suited to support hypothesis-generating research geared towards new discoveries. The talk will illustrate their use of lattice light-sheet microscopy to ‘see’ in three dimensions processes that mediate and regulate the biogenesis of organelles in living cells maintained in tissue culture conditions and will also describe their most recent efforts using lattice light sheet microscopy with adaptive optics to investigate with subcellular precision process in cells within tissues of a living zebrafish embryo.