Our team member, Maria Baczewska, was awarded the NCN Miniatura grant and, as a result of it, went on a three-month internship at the Institut de génomique fonctionnelle de Lyon (IGFL) during which she learned about cell culture protocols and organoids, as well as conducted a preliminary study about dry mass density changes in cells regulated by the internal circadian clock.
Quantitative measures of cellular organelle architectures and dynamics are crucial not only for studying their function but also to understand how they degrade during disease. Corrupted cellular processes share a number of common features, including misfolded protein aggregates, endoplasmic reticulum stress, formation of micronuclei, and mitochondrial network dysfunction. Circadian timekeeping is an emergent property of cellular physiology, and its disruption leads not only to behavioural changes, e.g., in sleep, but also to changes in organelle homeostasis that ultimately impact cell function. Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear.
The goal of this project was to conduct preliminary measurements of cellular organelle dynamics that are
regulated by the intrinsic circadian clock. The measurements were carried out with a 3D QPI system,
namely holographic tomography (HT). This measurement modality is a label-free method that does not require any fluorescent markers and allows retrieval of the 3D dry mass density distribution.
The internship took place in the lab of one of the leading experts in this field, Dr. Kiran Padmanabhan, head of the Molecular and Epigenetic Regulation of Biological Clocks laboratory, Institute of Functional Genomics (IGFL), ENS Lyon, France, who investigates the molecular and epigenetic mechanisms underlying biological clocks. Specifically, Dr. Padmanabhan’s group explores how circadian rhythms are established in mammalian tissues and how chromatin architecture influences clock gene expression.