Michael Liebling

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  Decoupling morphogenetic tissue deformations from functional motion in cardiac development
  Michael Liebling

  Live microscopy allows observing rapidly moving samples, such as whole embryos during their development. Motion can be local (e.g. individual cells migrating, dividing, or contracting) or more global (e.g. induced by tissue growth or organ function). When the observed motion is induced by more than a single process or occurs at multiple temporal and spatial scales, subtler motions and events are often hidden among more prominent, but unrelated, motions patterns. For example, within the beating and developing heart, cells undergo both rapid, periodic motions as the heart contracts to pump blood and also slower motions as the cells rearrange during maturation of the heart. In this talk, I will discuss in vivo image acquisition, processing, and analysis tools that we developed to digitally document both the morphogenesis and the function of the developing heart. Specifically, I will present our strategy to capture and integrate heterogeneous data acquired with multiple microscopy modalities (including fluorescence microscopy and optical coherence tomography), at multiple temporal and spatial scales (from milliseconds to hours and from single cells to entire organs, respectively), and in multiple dimensions. This allowed us to observe cellular division on the surface of the beating heart without the need to ever slow or stop it, demonstrating the possibility of disentangling complex motion patterns through customized imaging and digital post-processing strategies.