Celebrating a great year! Photobooth
We develop technologies to image and control the function of cells deep inside the body. These technologies take advantage of biomolecules with unusual physical properties allowing them to interact with sound waves and magnetic fields. We apply these tools to problems in synthetic biology, neuroscience, cancer, immunology and the mammalian microbiome.
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Celebrating a great year! Photobooth
Congratulations to Manuel, Audrey, and our collaborator in Electrical Engineering Azita Emami on the publication of a new approach to localizing microscale integrated circuits in the body using the principles of nuclear magnetic resonance.
Monge M, Lee-Gosselin A, Shapiro MG*, Emami A*. Localization of microscale devices in vivo using addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins. Nature Biomedical Engineering 1, 736-744 (2017).
article | readcube | news and views | press | behind the paper
Interested in making your own gas vesicles for ultrasound or MRI? An (excruciatingly) detailed protocol on GV production, purification, functionalization and imaging has just been published in Nature Protocols. Thanks to Anupama, George, Arash, Suchita, colleagues and collaborators on putting together this valuable resource.
Lakshmanan A#, Lu GJ#, Farhadi A#, Nety SP#, Kunth M, Lee-Gosselin A, Maresca D, Bourdeau RW, Yin M, Yan J, Witte C, Malounda D, Foster FS, Schröder L, Shapiro MG*. Preparation of biogenic gas vesicle nanostructures for use as contrast agents for ultrasound and MRI. Nature Protocols 12, 2050-2080 (2017). article | readcube
Congratulations to David, Anu, Audrey, Johan, Yu-Li, Ray and our collaborator Dennis Kochmann on their article in Applied Physics Letters describing the development of nonlinear pulse sequences to maximize ultrasound contrast from gas vesicle protein nanostructures.
Article: Nonlinear ultrasound imaging of nanoscale acoustic biomolecules
See also a complementary article in Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology with collaborators at UofT detailing gas vesicles’ acoustic behavior.
Congratulations to Arnab, Di and Hunter on their article in Nature Communications describing the membrane water channel aquaporin as a new class of reporter genes for magnetic resonance imaging.
Article: Non-invasive imaging using reporter genes altering cellular water permeability
Press release: Visualizing Gene Expression with MRI
Congratulations to Dan, Mohamad, Brittany and Audrey on their article in Nature Chemical Biology describing the development of “bacterial thermostats” that allow microbial therapeutics to be controlled remotely using ultrasound, respond to fever, or know when they have exited their host.
Article: Tunable thermal bioswitches for in vivo control of microbial therapeutics.
Press release: Biologists Give Bacteria Thermostat Controls
Video: Scientists Engineer Therapeutic Bacteria to Listen to Us
Highlight: Nature Methods
Congratulations to Anupama, Arash, Suchita, Audrey, Ray and David on their cover article in the September issue of ACS Nano! Their work describes how gas vesicles can be engineered at the level of their protein composition and sequence to exhibit new acoustic properties and molecular targeting.
Article: Molecular Engineering of Acoustic Protein Nanostructures
Press release: Designing ultrasound tools with lego-like proteins