Junsheng Chen

Junsheng Chen says: “Many important biological questions require imaging of large volume sample at the nanometer scale. The recent progress of expansion microscopy meets such requirement by expanding the sample and imaging it by conventional microscopy. However, the expanded samples show low signal to noise ratio because the expansion process dilutes the fluorescence markers. This becomes the major bottleneck for implementing expansion microscopy to standard biological labs. In this project we will implement ultrabright fluorescent nanoparticles for expansion microscopy and ensure this technique to be accessible for biological labs with conventional microscopy setups. Moreover, we will take advantage of the easy tunability of emission color and lifetime of the bright nanoparticles to develop expansion microscopy with 20 detection channels. This multichannel technique allows us to study in a new way how neurons place protein synthesizing machinery in different subcellular compartments providing us with insights currently not available.”

Junsheng Chen was born in China and finished his PhD in Lund University, Sweden in 2018. Since summer 2021 he has been assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry at University of Copenhagen. This Hallas-Møller Emerging Investigator grant will allow him to establish his own independent research group at the same institute.