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Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are becoming increasingly important for reproductive choices in our societies due to advancing age and increasing lifestyle diversity of new parents. Our understanding of the processes that limit fertility has advanced tremendously, driven by new optical imaging technologies such as light sheet fluorescence microscopy that can visualize such processes in oocytes and early embryos in mammalian laboratory models at the molecular and cellular scale. However, translating this progress to the fertility clinic to better understand, diagnose and treat the causes of human infertility has been precluded by the lack of technologies that would allow to cross from the molecular and cellular scale that is offered by advanced fluorescence technologies available in research infrastructures, to the physiological scale in the clinic, which must employ label-free imaging methods that do not perturb the fragile biological development at the beginning of life.

Our project aims to bridge the length scales of biology and medicine by developing a novel hybrid microscopy platform that uses the molecular specificity of fluorescence microscopy to computationally revolutionize the information content of label-free approaches. In an interdisciplinary collaboration with the EMBL Imaging Centre and research group of Robert Prevedel, as well as the University Hospital of Heidelberg, we will combine high-resolution fluorescence lightsheet with label-free optical coherence and Brillouin microscopies, which provide advanced morphological and mechanical features of the embryos, respectively. This multimodal data can then be used to train artificial intelligence (AI)-based models to recognize molecular and cellular changes from label-free images only. In this way, we will create a high-resolution cross scale imaging platform that has the potential to close the gap between basic and clinical research by bringing the molecular insights from the research laboratory to the fertility clinic and visualize the currently hidden processes associated with infertility.

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Closing date : 6 September 2024

Contract duration : 3 years

Grading : stipend

Reference number : HD02632

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