“Imaging and Mapping Crown-Like Structures in Intact Adipose Tissues”
Obesity is a major public health problem due to complications of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. The link between obesity and its associated diseases is now known to be low-grade inflammation, driven by the formation of adipose tissues’ “crown-like structures” (C) which are microenvironments in which apoptotic adipocytes are surrounded by inflammatory macrophages. The current understanding and quantification of CLSs mainly derive from sectioned tissue images, for which quantification is challenging and subjective. In this talk, I will discuss a novel strategy for three-dimensional imaging and mapping of CLSs in intact adipose tissues through combining optical clearing and image segmentation. In addition, we further explored the “microenvironment” through calculation of the pair distribution of all cells existing in tissues. This pipeline enables a new observable and statistic understanding of cell/CLS environment within intact tissues, which could further extend to other disease models for a better understanding and diagnosis. I will also discuss the synthesis and application of aqueous semiconductor nanocrystals with near infrared 2 emission for improving the immunofluorescence performance from clinical samples.
Speaker Biography
Junlong Geng is a Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from the National University of Singapore. His focus has been on the synthesis of functional nanomaterials based on conjugated polymers and aggregation-induced emissive fluorophores for bioimaging, biosensing, and therapeutic applications. At Beckman, he collaborated with Jefferson Chan, an assistant professor of chemistry, and Nancy Sottos, a professor of materials science and engineering, on polymeric damage detection. Currently, he focuses on improving the understanding and diagnosis of inflammation microenvironments in intact tissues with Andrew Smith, an associate professor of bioengineering.