VIBRANT

Laboratory Systems Analysis of Development, CRG – Centre de Regulacio Genomica, Barcelona, Spain

Working Group Leader

Dr James Sharpe

Expertise: The expertise of James Sharpe’s laboratory lies in 3D optical imaging/microscopy of biological samples. This includes both instrumentation (designing and constructing the device, troubleshooting, writing the control software, user-interface, and the algorithms for 3D reconstruction etc.), and also exploring the full range of possible biological applications for these new approaches. The group leader and the staff scientist are the inventors of two different recent 3D imaging technologies: OPT and SPlM.

Organization: The CRG is a new, interdisciplinary research institute, located in the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona, one of the largest biomedical research clusters in Southern Europe. The CRG is organized in 6 scientific programmes, one of which is the joint CRG-EMBL Systems Biology unit. The unit is headed by Prof. Luis Serrano and consists of 6 multi-disciplinary groups with a common focus to advance our understanding of complex biological systems.

Key recent publications of the team:

• Marit J Boot, C Henrik Westerberg, Juanjo Sanz-Ezquerro, James Cotterell, Ronen Schweitzer, Miguel Torres & James Sharpe. In vitro whole-organ imaging: 4D quantification of growing mouse limb buds. Nature  Methods. 5:609-612 (2008).
• Alanentalo T, Asayesh A, Morrison H, Loren CE, Holmberg D, Sharpe J, Ahlgren U. “Tomographic molecular imaging and 3D quantification within adult mouse organs”. Nature Methods 4(1):31-3 (2007).
• James Sharpe. “Optical Projection Tomography”. Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering 6:209-228 (2004).
• Huisken J, Swoger J, Del Bene F, Wittbrodt J, Stelzer EH. “Optical sectioning deep inside live embryos by selective plane illumination microscopy”. Science. 305:1007-9 (2004).
• James Sharpe, Ulf Ahlgren, Paul Perry, Bill Hill, Allyson Ross, Jacob Hecksher-Sorensen, Richard Baldock, Duncan Davidson. “Optical Projection Tomography: A new approach for 3-D microscopy and gene expression studies”. Science 296:541-545 (2002).