Francisco Balzarotti

Last updated
Francisco Balzarotti
Born1983
Buanos Aires, Argentina
Alma mater University of Buenos Aires (Diploma, PhD)
Known forMINFLUX, super-resolution microscopy, Single Molecule Tracking, Light Microscopy
Scientific career
Fields physics, electronics, optics, microscopy
Institutions
Website www.balzarotti-lab.org

Francisco Balzarotti (born in 1983 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an Argentinian scientist known for his work in super-resolution microscopy, particularly MINFLUX. He is a Group Leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria. [1]

Contents

Education

From 2002 to 2007, Balzarotti studied electrical engineering at the University of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2012, he earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, working on research topics such as nanophotonics, optical nanolithography, superlenses, and plasmonics. [2] [3]

Career and research

For his postgraduate work, Balzarotti relocated to Germany to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of NanoBiophotonics [4] at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, led by Nobel Laureate Stefan W. Hell.

In Göttingen, Balzarotti played a central role in developing the super-resolution microscopy method MINFLUX [5] [6] which was named Breakthrough of the Year in 2017 by Physics World. [7] The method was even described as the Holy Grail in Light Microscopy. [8]

MINFLUX combines elements of information theory with the single-emitter nature of PALM/STORM and the beam geometries typically used in STED. During Balzarotti's time in Göttingen, they were able to show that with MINFLUX, a given localization precision can be obtained by using much fewer photons than in conventional centroid-localization techniques such as PALM/STORM. Hence, MINFLUX attains nanometer-scale resolution more quickly and with fewer emitted photons than previously possible. Subsequent work increased the application space of the technology even further. [9] [10] [11]

Since 2020, Balzarotti has been a Group Leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria, supported by the European Research Council. At the IMP, he set up the Advanced Microscopy and Biophysics group. [12] [13] [14]

Balzarotti's group focuses on the development of novel optical methods and instrumentation for the observation of biological phenomena with the highest fidelity. His interdisciplinary group combines expertise in physics, engineering, mathematics, and biology.

Balzarotti is a well-known microscopist and an established member of the advanced microscopy community. Hence, he is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at key conferences in the field. [15] [16]

Balzarotti's group in collaboration with Mark Bates, organized the Single Molecule Localization Symposium 2023, which was hosted at IMP in Vienna. [17]

Awards and honours

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Optical microscope</span> Microscope that uses visible light

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A total internal reflection fluorescence microscope (TIRFM) is a type of microscope with which a thin region of a specimen, usually less than 200 nanometers can be observed.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">STED microscopy</span> Technique in fluorescence microscopy

Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy is one of the techniques that make up super-resolution microscopy. It creates super-resolution images by the selective deactivation of fluorophores, minimizing the area of illumination at the focal point, and thus enhancing the achievable resolution for a given system. It was developed by Stefan W. Hell and Jan Wichmann in 1994, and was first experimentally demonstrated by Hell and Thomas Klar in 1999. Hell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 for its development. In 1986, V.A. Okhonin had patented the STED idea. This patent was unknown to Hell and Wichmann in 1994.

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Stefan Walter Hell is a Romanian-German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, and of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, both of which are in Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy", together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Institute for Medical Research</span>

The Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, is a facility of the Max Planck Society for basic medical research. Since its foundation, six Nobel Prize laureates worked at the Institute: Otto Fritz Meyerhof (Physiology), Richard Kuhn (Chemistry), Walther Bothe (Physics), André Michel Lwoff, Rudolf Mößbauer (Physics), Bert Sakmann and Stefan W. Hell (Chemistry).

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Research Institute of Molecular Pathology</span>

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Photo-activated localization microscopy and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) are widefield fluorescence microscopy imaging methods that allow obtaining images with a resolution beyond the diffraction limit. The methods were proposed in 2006 in the wake of a general emergence of optical super-resolution microscopy methods, and were featured as Methods of the Year for 2008 by the Nature Methods journal. The development of PALM as a targeted biophysical imaging method was largely prompted by the discovery of new species and the engineering of mutants of fluorescent proteins displaying a controllable photochromism, such as photo-activatible GFP. However, the concomitant development of STORM, sharing the same fundamental principle, originally made use of paired cyanine dyes. One molecule of the pair, when excited near its absorption maximum, serves to reactivate the other molecule to the fluorescent state.

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References

  1. ↑ "Francisco Balzarotti's lab at the IMP" . Retrieved 2023-07-19.
  2. ↑ https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisco-balzarotti/
  3. ↑ "Francisco Balzarotti | Light-based microscopy | Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP)".
  4. ↑ "Stefan Hell".
  5. ↑ "Researchers achieve ultimate resolution limit in fluorescence microscopy".
  6. ↑ Balzarotti, Francisco; Eilers, Yvan; Gwosch, Klaus C.; Gynnå, Arvid H.; Westphal, Volker; Stefani, Fernando D.; Elf, Johan; Hell, Stefan W. (2017). "Nanometer resolution imaging and tracking of fluorescent molecules with minimal photon fluxes". Science. 355 (6325): 606–612. arXiv: 1611.03401 . Bibcode:2017Sci...355..606B. doi:10.1126/science.aak9913. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-002C-2D9A-4. PMID   28008086. S2CID   5418707.
  7. ↑ "First multimessenger observation of a neutron-star merger is Physics World 2017 Breakthrough of the Year". 11 December 2017.
  8. ↑ "Researchers achieve ultimate resolution limit in fluorescence microscopy".
  9. ↑ Eilers, Yvan; Ta, Haisen; Gwosch, Klaus C.; Balzarotti, Francisco; Hell, Stefan W. (2018). "MINFLUX monitors rapid molecular jumps with superior spatiotemporal resolution". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115 (24): 6117–6122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1801672115 . PMC   6004438 . PMID   29844182.
  10. ↑ Pape, Jasmin K.; Stephan, Till; Balzarotti, Francisco; Büchner, Rebecca; Lange, Felix; Riedel, Dietmar; Jakobs, Stefan; Hell, Stefan W. (2020). "Multicolor 3D MINFLUX nanoscopy of mitochondrial MICOS proteins". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117 (34): 20607–20614. Bibcode:2020PNAS..11720607P. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2009364117 . PMC   7456099 . PMID   32788360.
  11. ↑ Gwosch, Klaus C.; Pape, Jasmin K.; Balzarotti, Francisco; Hoess, Philipp; Ellenberg, Jan; Ries, Jonas; Hell, Stefan W. (2020). "MINFLUX nanoscopy delivers 3D multicolor nanometer resolution in cells". Nature Methods. 17 (2): 217–224. doi:10.1038/s41592-019-0688-0. PMID   31932776. S2CID   256840140.
  12. ↑ "Francisco Balzarotti | Light-based microscopy | Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP)".
  13. ↑ https://www.balzarotti-lab.org/
  14. ↑ "Francisco Balzarotti | Research at a molecular biology institute when you are not a biologist". YouTube .
  15. ↑ "Seeing is Believing: Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life – Course and Conference Office".
  16. ↑ "Program".
  17. ↑ https://smlms.org/
  18. ↑ "ERC Starting Grants 2019 – List of Principal Investigators" (PDF). Retrieved 2023-07-19.
  19. ↑ "High-throughput 4D imaging for nanoscale cellular studies" . Retrieved 2023-07-19.
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