Tuesday November 30th 2021
LONDON 16:00 | BERLIN 17:00 | DUBAI 20:00
Viscosity is one of the main factors which influence diffusion in condensed media. In a cell, microscopic viscosity (microviscosity) can play a role in several diffusion-mediated processes, such as drug delivery, signaling, and mass transport. Previously, alterations in microviscosity in cells and organs have been linked to malfunction; however, mapping microviscosity on a single-cell scale remains a challenge.
Join our upcoming webinar to see how microviscosity and crowding have been imaged inside lipid mono- and bi-layers, in cells and in vivo, using fluorescent probes, called molecular rotors (1,2). Molecular rotors respond to the microviscosity of the local environment through the speed of rotation around a sterically-hindered bond that is viscosity-dependent and strongly affects fluorescence lifetime or spectra of rotors, allowing fluorescence imaging. This approach enables the measurement of both the microviscosity and temperature (2,3) as well as the presence of unusual DNA topologies, G-quadruplexes (4,5), and monitors their temporal changes in real time.
In this webinar, you will discover more about:
Marina Kuimova is a Reader (Associate Professor) at Imperial College London. She obtained her Master’s Degree at Moscow State University (Russia), and a doctorate at the University of Nottingham (UK) in 2006. Following a postdoctoral appointment at Imperial, she became a group leader and an EPSRC Life Science Interface Fellow (in 2007), and EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow (in 2010). She was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial in 2012 and promoted to a Readership in 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a member of the Editorial Board of an IoP journal Methods and Applications of Fluorescence, and has received numerous awards and honors for her work.
References
1. M. K. Kuimova Phys Chem Chem Phys. 2012;14, 12671
2. A. Vyšniauskas et al., Int Rev Phys Chem. 2018;37:2, 259
3. A. Vyšniauskas, et al., Chem Sci. 2015;6, 5773
4. A. Shivalingam, et al., Nat Commun. 2015;6, 8178
5. P. A. Summers, B. W. Lewis, et al., Nat Commun. 2021;12, 162
6. J. E. Chambers et al., ACS Nano 2018;12, 4398
7. M. Kubankova et al., ACS Appl Mater Interfaces 2019;11, 36307
8. J. A. Robson et al, Angew Chem Intl Ed. 2020;59, 21431
