Galo Garcia III

Cells can be highly motile, moving in and out of a microscope’s field of view. Understanding complex life cycles is difficult without continuous observation. To overcome this challenge, we’ve developed a 3D-printed microchamber device to confine cells for long-term visualization.

Constraining motile microorganisms for live imaging often requires costly microfluidics or optical traps to keep them in view. We used patterned stamps and agar to make versatile, inexpensive “microchambers” and offer a way to predict the right chamber size for a given organism.

We’re crossing C. reinhardtii and C. smithii algae for high-throughput genotype-phenotype mapping. In preparation, we’re comparing the parents to uncover unique species-specific phenotypes.

The ProteinCartography pipeline identifies proteins related to a query protein using sequence- and structure-based searches, compares all protein structures, and creates a navigable map that can be used to look at protein relationships and make hypotheses about function.

We distilled label-free microscopy data by comparing and implementing feature-detection algorithms. Sobel and Laplacian methods outperformed pixel intensity variance in accuracy.