Plenary speaker Lippincott-Schwartz illuminates cellular dynamics

Microscience 2010 opened with the award of the Pearse Prize, the Royal Microscopical Society's highest award, to Dr Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

Lippincott-Schwartz was presented with a medal and certificate by Dr Paul Monaghan, the RMS' new president.

Delivering the first of three daily plenary lectures, Lippincott-Schwartz gave a masterclass in the use of photoactivatable fluorescent proteins to study membrane trafficking, cytoskeletal dynamics and protein and organelle turnover in living cells.

Since the advent of fluorescent proteins in 1992 there is now a wide range of these probes available to cell biologists.  Through genetic modification, the photoactivatable fluorescent proteins (PA-FPs) can with a UV pulse be switched from, for eample, from dark to green, from green to red or switched on and off.

Lippincott-Schwartz showed a dramatic movie of the retrograde flow of actin-tdEOS in the lamellipodium of a crawling cell, described membrane partitioning of VSV in the Golgi, reviewed ER-associated degradation of proteins using CD3d-GFP, and demonstrated starvation-induced autophagy in CFP-LC3 cells, showing that the autophagosomes are derived from mitochondria. Lippincott-Schwartz concluded by discussing  superresolution microscopy techniques with PALM, showing, inter alia, how two-colour PALM can reveal subunit stoichiometry in cellulat complexes such as integrins.