Ilaria Testa

Last updated
Ilaria Testa
Alma mater University of Genoa
OccupationPhysicist
Known for RESOLFT, superresolution microscopy
Scientific career
Institutions Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Academic advisors Alberto Diaspro
Stefan Hell
Website www.testalab.org

Ilaria Testa is an Italian-born scientist who is a Fellow at the SciLifeLab in Stockholm and an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Physics at the School of Engineering Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. [1] She has made major contributions to advanced microscopy, particularly superresolution microscopy (RESOLFT, STED).[ citation needed ]

Contents

Education

Testa studied physics at University of Genoa in Italy and graduated with a M.Sc. in 2005. In 2009, she earned her Ph.D. in Biotechnology. During her Ph.D., she worked on quantitative methods in single-molecule biophysics and studied transitional states in fluorescent proteins. [2] After completing her thesis, supervised by Alberto Diaspro, she joined Stefan Hell's research group at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany as a postdoctoral researcher [3] where she had already spent part of her doctoral studies.

Career and research

At the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Testa played a central role in establishing the superresolution technique RESOLFT, showing that superresolution microscopy can be realized with lower levels of light in living cells and tissues making it more attractive for its usage in the life sciences. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

In 2015, Testa was appointed Fellow at the SciLifeLab in Stockholm and assistant professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. At the SciLifeLab, she set up the Laboratory for Advanced Optical BioImaging. [9] Recently, she was appointed associate professor. [10]

Testa and her team continue to develop further and use superresolution techniques such as STED and RESOLFT microscopy to understand the fundamental biological processes for health and diseases. [11] [12] [13]

Testa is a well-known microscopist who is an established member of the advanced microscopy community and is frequently invited on panels and as a keynote speaker at key conferences in the field. [14] [15] [16]

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

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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.

RESOLFT, an acronym for REversible Saturable OpticaLFluorescence Transitions, denotes a group of optical fluorescence microscopy techniques with very high resolution. Using standard far field visible light optics a resolution far below the diffraction limit down to molecular scales can be obtained.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stefan Hell</span> Romanian-German physicist (born 1962)

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">GSD microscopy</span>

Ground state depletion microscopy is an implementation of the RESOLFT concept. The method was proposed in 1995 and experimentally demonstrated in 2007. It is the second concept to overcome the diffraction barrier in far-field optical microscopy published by Stefan Hell. Using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds a resolution of up to 7.8 nm was achieved in 2009. This is far below the diffraction limit (~200 nm).

Christoph Cremer is a German physicist and emeritus at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, former honorary professor at the University of Mainz and was a former group leader at Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, who has successfully overcome the conventional limit of resolution that applies to light based investigations by a range of different methods. In the meantime, according to his own statement, Christoph Cremer is a member of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research.

Super-resolution microscopy is a series of techniques in optical microscopy that allow such images to have resolutions higher than those imposed by the diffraction limit, which is due to the diffraction of light. Super-resolution imaging techniques rely on the near-field or on the far-field. Among techniques that rely on the latter are those that improve the resolution only modestly beyond the diffraction-limit, such as confocal microscopy with closed pinhole or aided by computational methods such as deconvolution or detector-based pixel reassignment, the 4Pi microscope, and structured-illumination microscopy technologies such as SIM and SMI.

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References

  1. ↑ "Ilaria Testa" . Retrieved 2023-07-06.
  2. ↑ Marx, Vivien (August 1, 2018). "Ilaria Testa". Nature Methods. 15 (8): 557. doi: 10.1038/s41592-018-0078-z . PMID   30065372. S2CID   256836501.
  3. ↑ "Interview: Staying focused". eLife. October 9, 2017.
  4. ↑ Grotjohann, Tim; Testa, Ilaria; Leutenegger, Marcel; Bock, Hannes; Urban, Nicolai T.; Lavoie-Cardinal, Flavie; Willig, Katrin I.; Eggeling, Christian; Jakobs, Stefan; Hell, Stefan W. (October 8, 2011). "Diffraction-unlimited all-optical imaging and writing with a photochromic GFP". Nature. 478 (7368): 204–208. Bibcode:2011Natur.478..204G. doi:10.1038/nature10497. PMID   21909116. S2CID   2393728 – via www.nature.com.
  5. ↑ Brakemann, Tanja; Stiel, Andre C.; Weber, Gert; Andresen, Martin; Testa, Ilaria; Grotjohann, Tim; Leutenegger, Marcel; Plessmann, Uwe; Urlaub, Henning; Eggeling, Christian; Wahl, Markus C.; Hell, Stefan W.; Jakobs, Stefan (October 8, 2011). "A reversibly photoswitchable GFP-like protein with fluorescence excitation decoupled from switching". Nature Biotechnology. 29 (10): 942–947. doi:10.1038/nbt.1952. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0012-3E58-5 . PMID   21909082. S2CID   17238219 – via www.nature.com.
  6. ↑ Testa, Ilaria; D’Este, Elisa; Urban, Nicolai T.; Balzarotti, Francisco; Hell, Stefan W. (January 14, 2015). "Dual Channel RESOLFT Nanoscopy by Using Fluorescent State Kinetics". Nano Letters. 15 (1): 103–106. Bibcode:2015NanoL..15..103T. doi:10.1021/nl503058k. PMID   25423166 – via CrossRef.
  7. ↑ https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(12)00719-2.pdf
  8. ↑ "Pushing the Boundaries of Super-resolution Microscopy" – via www.youtube.com.
  9. ↑ "TestaLab". www.testalab.org.
  10. ↑ "KTH | Ilaria Testa". www.kth.se.
  11. ↑ Bodén, Andreas; Pennacchietti, Francesca; Coceano, Giovanna; Damenti, Martina; Ratz, Michael; Testa, Ilaria (May 8, 2021). "Volumetric live cell imaging with three-dimensional parallelized RESOLFT microscopy". Nature Biotechnology. 39 (5): 609–618. doi:10.1038/s41587-020-00779-2. PMID   33432197. S2CID   231585351 – via www.nature.com.
  12. ↑ Masullo, Luciano A.; Bodén, Andreas; Pennacchietti, Francesca; Coceano, Giovanna; Ratz, Michael; Testa, Ilaria (August 16, 2018). "Enhanced photon collection enables four dimensional fluorescence nanoscopy of living systems". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 3281. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.3281M. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05799-w. PMC   6095837 . PMID   30115928.
  13. ↑ Pennacchietti, Francesca; Serebrovskaya, Ekaterina O.; Faro, Aline R.; Shemyakina, Irina I.; Bozhanova, Nina G.; Kotlobay, Alexey A.; Gurskaya, Nadya G.; Bodén, Andreas; Dreier, Jes; Chudakov, Dmitry M.; Lukyanov, Konstantin A.; Verkhusha, Vladislav V.; Mishin, Alexander S.; Testa, Ilaria (August 8, 2018). "Fast reversibly photoswitching red fluorescent proteins for live-cell RESOLFT nanoscopy". Nature Methods. 15 (8): 601–604. doi:10.1038/s41592-018-0052-9. PMID   29988095. S2CID   256840689 – via www.nature.com.
  14. ↑ "Seeing is Believing: Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life – Course and Conference Office". www.embl.org.
  15. ↑ "Speakers – Rudolf-Virchow-Zentrum – Center for Integrative and Translational Bioimaging". www.uni-wuerzburg.de.
  16. ↑ "Speakers – SMLMS 2023".
  17. ↑ "Long-term molecular nanoscale imaging of neuronal function | MoNaLISA | Project | Fact sheet | H2020 | CORDIS | European Commission".
  18. ↑ "ESP Young Investigator Award | European Society for Photobiology". www.photobiology.eu.
  19. ↑ "Two KTH researchers receive ERC Consolidator Grants". KTH.
  20. ↑ "Three SciLifeLab researchers receive ERC Consolidator Grants". December 17, 2020.
  21. ↑ "List of Principal Investigators – LS domain" (PDF).
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