CBE Seminar Series: Warren Zipfel, Cornell University

Description

Optical Imaging and Nanometer-Scale Photoactivation Methods for Studying Cellular and Nuclear Structure and Signaling

Optical microscopy and fluorescence methods are involved in nearly every area of basic biological and biomedical research. This talk will cover two projects in my lab that use the power of lasers, fluorescence and non-linear photochemistry to image at the single molecule level to quantify protein complex stoichiometry, and to understand the complexity of nuclear structure and transcriptional regulation. The first project is a new method in which we use single molecule imaging to quantify protein complex oligomerization in the cytosol or plasma membrane. The second project employs highly localized 3D photochemistry in femtoliter volumes to photo-biotinylate chromatin for pull-down and sequencing. This technology provides a new way to find spatial relationships between promotor and regulatory regions of a gene locus or between a gene and nuclear structures that may be involved in signal transduction from the environment through the cytosol and into the nucleus where chromatin conformation changes are thought to regulate transcription.

Biography: Warren R. Zipfel is an Associate Professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell. He received his BS (1987) and PhD (1993) from Cornell University, and worked as Research Associate in Applied and Engineering Physics (AEP) in the area of biophysics and biological imaging for several years with Dr. Watt Webb. While in AEP he served as the Associate Director (1996-2006) and later Director (2006-2011) of the Developmental Resource for Biophysical Imaging Optoelectronics (known as DRBIO), an NIH P41 center focused on the creation of new optical imaging and fluorescence detection technologies. In 2005, he moved to a faculty position in the newly created Department of Biomedical Engineering, and in 2007 moved his lab into the new imaging suite in the basement of Weill Hall where it is coupled with the Cornell’s Biotechnology Resource Center’s Imaging Facility. He currently serves as Scientific Advisor for the BRC Imaging Facility and as Core Leader of the Biophysics and Metabolic Imaging Core for the Center on the Physics of Cancer Metabolism. His research focus remains on the development and application of light microscopy, spectroscopy and optically based bioanalytical tools for biomedical and biological research, which he and his lab apply in studies of transcriptional regulation and nuclear structure, cell signaling and cancer biology.