BMEG Seminar: Label-Free Multi-Scale Imaging of Mitochondrial and Metabolic Function in Tissues

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Irene Georgakoudi, professor of biomedical engineering, Tufts University.

The Department of Biomedical Engineering will host Irene Georgakoudi, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University, at 11:50 a.m. Friday, Feb. 9, in Bell Engineering 1108G. Georgakoudi will highlight the unique opportunities to assess metabolic and mitochondrial function and/or dysfunction afforded by label-free, two-photon imaging.

The high spatiotemporal resolution and non-destructive nature of these measurements are key enabling features for such functional assessments. The autofluorescence intensity and lifetime of NAD(P)H and FAD serve as sensitive sources of metabolic contrast in two-photon images of specimens varying in scale from isolated mitochondria to living humans. These metabolic co-enzymes are involved in several key metabolic pathways occurring within mitochondria and the cytosol, employed to maintain health, growth and reproduction of cells, tissues and organisms. The high resolution of two-photon images enables unique assessments of the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction, which is recognized increasingly as a significant driver of events that determine the development and/or treatment response of numerous diseases. Examples to highlight such measurements in the context of cancer, vitiligo and neurodegeneration will be presented. The combination of multiple metabolic function metrics extracted from analysis of intensity and lifetime images will be shown to provide, at least in part, specificity in terms of the metabolic pathway changes that lead to the detected optical images. In addition, the utilization of full spectral images to identify additional major contributors to cellular autofluorescence, such as lipofuscin, will be presented. This is important to understand how such fluorophores interfere with signals that are typically attributed to NAD(P)H and FAD and how to properly account for their presence so that robust metabolic function assessments can be made.

Georgakoudi is a professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Tufts Advanced Microscopic Imaging Center at Tufts University. She studied physics at Dartmouth College and biophysics at the University of Rochester. She was introduced to label-free, optical diagnostics as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. She has continued to pursue this line of research as an independent investigator at Tufts University, after being an instructor at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Her work focuses on the development and application of imaging modalities that exploit endogenous light scattering and fluorescence contrast to characterize quantitatively tissue function and morphology to improve understanding, diagnosis and monitoring of human diseases. She has over 120 peer-reviewed publications and holds several patents.

She is a fellow of the American Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Optica and SPIE.  She is dedicated to inclusive teaching practices and mentorship, welcoming trainees from all backgrounds from the high school to the postdoctoral level.

All are welcome. This seminar is also available via Zoom.