Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 8: Posters - Bioimaging and Spectroscopy

BP 8.9: Poster

Montag, 20. März 2017, 17:30–19:30, P3

Improving tissue transparency by combinatorial expression of crystallins — •Samet Kocabey, Heike Petzold, Kaushikaram Subramanian, and Moritz Kreysing — MPI-CBG, Dresden, Germany

The optical access to biological tissues has long been a goal for scientists to get physiological information. Most tissues show poor optical quality due to the light scattering emerging from heterogeneous refractive index distribution. There are few exceptions including the eye-lens where the cells in the light path leading to the retina have evolved to be transparent that allows minimal light scattering before sensed by retina.

The lens fiber cells are largely comprised of crystallin proteins assembled into a highly ordered macro-structure essential for tuning the refractive index and thus lens transparency. The crystallin proteins have chaperone-like activity and mutations in crystallins cause protein aggregation that leads to cataract formation. However, the precise mechanism by which crystallin proteins maintain the lens transparency is poorly understood. In this study, we aim to find the genetic determinants of lens tissue transparency and ultimately enhance the optical properties of other tissues by combinatorial expression of crystallins and crystallin-related proteins in cells from different tissues.