Full project title: “Polarization optical diffraction tomography for high-throughput label-free lipid droplets morphological analysis in living cells”

The project aims at the development of multimodal polarization sensitive optical diffraction tomography methods to offer new capabilities in high-throughput analysis of lipid droplets (LDs) in cells and tissues. LDs are crucial organelles for neutral lipid storage, with energy-rich triglycerides and sterol esters serving as lipid reserves essential for cellular balance. Keeping lipid levels balanced is critical for cell health. Altered LDs lipid composition or lipid composition in general are linked to pathologies, e.g. atherosclerotic lesions. Interestingly, upon exposure to cholesterol esters (CE), LDs form a so-called liquid crystalline phase (LCP) at the LD membrane. A deeper understanding of the internal structure of LDs is crucial for advancing cell biology and medicine. Understanding how CE affect cellular functions could contribute to the development of new therapeutic strategies targeting these processes. For example, manipulating LCP of LDs could change how cells store and utilize lipids, which has potential applications in treating obesity and related disorders. Importantly, LDs are highly heterogeneous, as the LCP only forms at particular level of cholesterol esters. Hence, it is important to provide a highly sensitive, quantitative tool for LDs analysis down to the single LD precision. So far, LCP can only be imaged using cryo-electron microscopy, which is of low throughput, expensive, sample preparation is very long and does not offer imaging of living samples. LDs with LCP have also shown that LCP can be detected using polarization microscopy, but it does not offer quantitative analysis. Hence, with our newly developed techniques, we aim to use the polarization optical diffraction tomography for high-throughput measurements of refractive index (RI) of LDs structure and carry out their morphological assay (label-free lipidometry).

Principal Investigator: Piotr Zdańkowski, PhD

Full project title:This section is currently being updated.