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 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).

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]

From 2015 to 2024, Testa was appointed as a Fellow at the SciLifeLab in Stockholm and served as both an assistant professor and an associate professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. At the SciLifeLab, she set up the Laboratory for Advanced Optical BioImaging. [9]

In November 2024, she was appointed professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. [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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immunofluorescence</span> Technique used for light microscopy

Immunofluorescence(IF) is a light microscopy-based technique that allows detection and localization of a wide variety of target biomolecules within a cell or tissue at a quantitative level. The technique utilizes the binding specificity of antibodies and antigens. The specific region an antibody recognizes on an antigen is called an epitope. Several antibodies can recognize the same epitope but differ in their binding affinity. The antibody with the higher affinity for a specific epitope will surpass antibodies with a lower affinity for the same epitope.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fluorescence microscope</span> Optical microscope that uses fluorescence and phosphorescence

A fluorescence microscope is an optical microscope that uses fluorescence instead of, or in addition to, scattering, reflection, and attenuation or absorption, to study the properties of organic or inorganic substances. "Fluorescence microscope" refers to any microscope that uses fluorescence to generate an image, whether it is a simple set up like an epifluorescence microscope or a more complicated design such as a confocal microscope, which uses optical sectioning to get better resolution of the fluorescence image.

A 4Pi microscope is a laser scanning fluorescence microscope with an improved axial resolution. With it the typical range of the axial resolution of 500–700 nm can be improved to 100–150 nm, which corresponds to an almost spherical focal spot with 5–7 times less volume than that of standard confocal microscopy.

<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> Method of microscopy

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Live-cell imaging</span> Study of living cells using time-lapse microscopy

Live-cell imaging is the study of living cells using time-lapse microscopy. It is used by scientists to obtain a better understanding of biological function through the study of cellular dynamics. Live-cell imaging was pioneered in the first decade of the 21st century. One of the first time-lapse microcinematographic films of cells ever made was made by Julius Ries, showing the fertilization and development of the sea urchin egg. Since then, several microscopy methods have been developed to study living cells in greater detail with less effort. A newer type of imaging using quantum dots have been used, as they are shown to be more stable. The development of holotomographic microscopy has disregarded phototoxicity and other staining-derived disadvantages by implementing digital staining based on cells’ refractive index.

Gražvydas Lukinavičius is a Lithuanian biochemist. His scientific interest and main area of research is focused on labeling of biomolecules and visualization using super-resolution microscopy. He is co-invertor of DNA labeling technology known as Methyltransferase-Directed Transfer of Activated Groups (mTAG) and biocompatible and cell permeable fluorophore – silicon-rhodamine (SiR). Both inventions were commercialized. He is studying labeling methods and apply them for chromatin dynamics visualization in living cells.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suliana Manley</span> American biophysicist

Suliana Manley is an American biophysicist. Her research focuses on the development of high-resolution optical instruments, and their application in studying the organization and dynamics of proteins. She is a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and heads the Laboratory of Experimental Biophysics.

Gerd Ulrich "Uli" Nienhaus is a German physicist who is a professor and director of the Institute of Applied Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). At the KIT, he is also affiliated with the Institute of Nanotechnology, Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems, and Institute of Physical Chemistry, and he is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Emma Lundberg is a Swedish cell biologist who is a professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Director of Cell Profiling at the Science for Life Laboratory. Her research considers spatial proteomics and cell biology, making use of an antibody-based approach to assess fundamental aspects of human biology. She looks to understand why certain variations in human proteins can cause disease.

Francisco Balzarotti 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.

Melike Lakadamyali is a Cypriot physicist and a Full Professor of Physiology and of Cell and Developmental Biology (secondary) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, renowned for her work in super-resolution microscopy and Single Molecule Biophysics. She is the Group Leader of the Lakadamyali Lab.

MINFLUX, or minimal fluorescence photon fluxes microscopy, is a super-resolution light microscopy method that images and tracks objects in two and three dimensions with single-digit nanometer resolution.

Julia Mahamid is a cell biologist, structural biologist, and electron microscopist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, who utilizes biomolecular condensates and advanced cellular cryo-electron tomography to enhance the comprehension of the functional organization of the cytoplasm. She leads the Mahamid Group.

Harald Frederick Hess is an American physicist and Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, known for his work in scanning probe microscopy, light microscopy and electron microscopy.

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". 19 September 2012 – 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).
  22. ↑ "Award for Light Microscopy".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.