Imaging living systems

Over the last 10 years, advances in microscopy and genome sequencing have revolutionised our understanding of how molecular programmes contained in the genome control cellular behaviours such as cell division, differentiation or death, and how these behaviours are influenced by biochemical and mechanical signals from the cell environment. In this talk, I will present a new methodology called 'spatial mechano-transcriptomics', which allows the simultaneous measurement of the mechanical and transcriptional states of cells in a multicellular tissue at single cell resolution. This new framework provides a generic scheme for exploring the interplay of biomolecular and mechanical cues in tissues in a variety of contexts, such as embryonic development, tissue homeostasis and regeneration, but also in diseases such as cancer.