GREENBAUM LAB
The Greenbaum Lab is an emerging advanced bio-imaging and computational lab. We are a multidisciplinary lab that focuses on the development of complex imaging devices and algorithms to advance 3D profiling of intact organs to answer biological questions regarding aging and disease progression. While we are especially interested in profiling bones, we are also capable of clearing and imaging other organs, such as the heart and the brain (see below). Application areas will span the development of (i) adaptive light-sheet microscopes and algorithms for rapid high-resolution imaging of whole organisms, (ii) computational tools to handle big data, and (iii) translational applications, such as exploration of rare stem-cell niches in the context of age-associated diseases.
Intact
hemisphere
of
an adult mouse
Black: antibody stained microglia up to 5 mm deep into the tissue. The images were captured using a custom light-sheet microscope and tissue clearing
Research
Tissue clearing (TC) methods render entire organs transparent and have revolutionized the anatomical and transcriptional investigation of biological tissue. In comparison to sectioning techniques, it has the benefit of leaving complex pathways spatially intact and retaining rare features that are distributed widely across normal and diseased tissue. While TC affords novel prospects, there are several technological bottlenecks that hinder its potential use in a broader range of applications. For example, prolonged acquisition time required to image large volumes of cleared tissue, or data analysis of large data-sets.
Resolving the aforementioned technical issues will afford the investigation of several biological questions which cannot be presently addressed, such as exploration of rare microenvironments, (e.g., stem-cell niches) within the context of age-associated diseases and drug perturbation, the acquisition of high-resolution bio-distribution maps of novel drugs, tracing regeneration of nerve/axons during embryonic development, exploring the brain-gut axis, and more. See example projects below:
Development of adaptive imaging devices that can image whole organs in a few hours and with consistent resolution,
Development of image analysis tools to transform big datasets of images into meaningful data
