Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 15: Posters: Multi-cellular systems

BP 15.1: Poster

Monday, March 16, 2015, 17:30–19:30, Poster A

GPU accelerated simulation of light propagation through retinal volumes mapped by multi-photon microscopy — •Martin Weigert, Alfonso Garcia-Ulloa, Heike Petzold, Kaushikaram Subramanian, Eugene Myers, and Moritz Kreysing — Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

The architecture of photoreceptor cells (PRC) nuclei differs considerably between nocturnal and diurnal mammals: whereas diurnal mammals possess conventional PRC nuclei, nocturnal mammals show a uniquely inverted PCR architecture characterized by the compaction of dense heterochromatin in the nuclear center. As the refractive index increases with molecular density, this nuclear inversion was suggested to reduce light scattering as inferred by 2D simulation, and direct measurement on individual isolated nuclei.

Here we show how a beam propagation method implemented on GPU accelerators can considerably speed up these calculations and allows for simulating the propagation of light through realistically large 3D retinal volumes. This way we studied the evolution of the angular spectrum of light on its way through a 3D model of the outer nuclear layer, which we obtained from multi-photon microscopy. We found that the near field coupling between cell nuclei of inverted architecture leads indeed to an overall reduction in scattering, as opposed to an absolute summation of the individual cell scattering contributions.