2014 Theses Doctoral

Chemical Approaches for Advanced Optical Imaging

Chen, Zhixing

Advances in optical microscopy have been constantly expanding our knowledge of biological systems. The achievements therein are a result of close collaborations between physicists/engineers who build the imaging instruments and chemists/biochemists who design the corresponding probe molecules. In this work I present a number of chemical approaches for the development of advanced optical imaging methods. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the recent advances of novel imaging approaches taking advantage of chemical tag technologies. Chapter 2 describes the second-generation covalent trimethoprim-tag as a viable tool for live cell protein-specific labeling and imaging. In Chapter 3 we present a fluorescence lifetime imaging approach to map protein-specific micro-environment in live cells using TMP-Cy3 as a chemical probe. In Chapter 4, we present a method harnessing photo-activatable fluorophores to extend the fundamental depth limit in multi-photon microscopy. Chapter 5 describes the development of isotopically edited alkyne palette for multi-color live cell vibrational imaging of cellular small molecules. These studies exemplify the impact of modern chemical approaches in the development of advanced optical microscopies.