Intravital imaging of cardiac function at the single-cell level.

Knowledge of cardiomyocyte biology is limited by the lack of methods to interrogate single-cell physiology in vivo. Here we show that contracting myocytes can indeed be imaged with optical microscopy at high temporal and spatial resolution in the beating murine heart, allowing visualization of individual sarcomeres and measurement of the single cardiomyocyte contractile cycle. Collectively, this has been enabled by efficient tissue stabilization, a prospective real-time cardiac gating approach, an image processing algorithm for motion-artifact-free imaging throughout the cardiac cycle, and a fluorescent membrane staining protocol.

Differential contribution of monocytes to heart macrophages in steady-state and after myocardial infarction.

Rationale: Macrophages populate the steady-state myocardium. Previously, all macrophages were thought to arise from monocytes; however, it emerged that, in several organs, tissue-resident macrophages may self-maintain through local proliferation.

Objective: Our aim was to study the contribution of monocytes to cardiac-resident macrophages in steady state, after macrophage depletion in CD11b(DTR/+) mice and in myocardial infarction.

Fluorescent exendin-4 derivatives for pancreatic β-cell analysis.

The ability to reliably identify pancreatic β-cells would have far reaching implications for a greater understanding of β-cell biology, measurement of β-cell mass in diabetes, islet transplantation, and drug development. The glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP1R) is highly expressed on the surface of insulin producing pancreatic β-cells. Using systematic modifications of the GLP1R ligand, exendin-4, we screened over 25 compounds and identified a palette of fluorescent exendin-4 with high GLP1R binding affinity.

Comparison of select cancer biomarkers in human circulating and bulk tumor cells using magnetic nanoparticles and a miniaturized micro-NMR system.

Unlabelled: Circulating tumor cells (CTC) harvested from peripheral blood have received significant interest as sources for serial sampling to gauge treatment efficacy. Nanotechnology and microfluidic based approaches are emerging to facilitate such analyses. While of considerable clinical importance, there is little information on how similar or different CTCs are from their shedding bulk tumors.