About Me

I am currently enrolled as a PhD student on the MRes/PhD course in Modelling Biological Complexity at the Centre for Mathematics, Physics and Engineering in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX) at UCL. CoMPLEX is an interdisciplinary centre where students from a wide range of fields are taught how to interact and apply their expertise collaboratively to achieve advances in the life sciences and experimental biology.

My PhD project is being undertaken in the field of super-resolution microscopy in the Quantitative Imaging and Nanobiophysics Group (Link) at the Medical Research Council - Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (LMCB) supervised by Dr Ricardo Henriques and Dr Alan Lowe. The broad aims of my PhD will be the development of biological imaging techniques with a primary focus on the development of new fluorescent probes and analytical methods with a view to enabling fast live-cell super-resolution.

As part of my PhD I am also one of the primary developers of the NanoJ project - a collection of analytical methods dedicated to super-resolution and advanced imaging compatible with ImageJ - being developed by the Henriques Laboratory. Part of this project SRRF (an open-source analytical approach for Live-cell Super-Resolution Microscopy) has now been published in Nature Communications and is available to download and use.

Research Interests

My primary research interest is in the application of physics and mathematics in enabling experimental biology research and theoretical biophysics.

I am particularly interested in applying photophysics, optics and analytical image processing to develop experimental technology and methods which allow quantitative analysis of biological processes. Understanding and manipulating the photophysics of fluorescent dyes and labelling techniques can provide experimentalists with information additional to a conventional intensity map (or image) and post acquisition data analysis tools can be developed to maximise the information content of imaging based methods. This additional information can be used in many ways, for example, to elucidate structures below the resolution limit of light microscopes (superresolution) or to determine dynamics and microenvironmental properties (such as in FRAP and FLIM). Fluorescence is a stochastic process as are nanoscale biological processes (such as microtubule polymerisation) and as such theoretical methods have been and continue to be drawn from statistical physics and statistical mechanics to inform the development theoretical models in a range of biological systems. My belief is that newly developing nanoscale imaging modalities, i.e. video rate superresolution in live cells, used in combination with predictions from biophysical models could vastly accelerate our basic understanding of the underlying mechanics of cell biology.

Publications

Gustafsson N., Culley S., Ashdown G., Owen D.M., Pereira P.M., Henriques R., Fast live-cell conventional fluorophore nanoscopy with ImageJ through super-resolution radial fluctuations Nature Communications, 7, 12471 (2016); doi: 10.1038/ncomms12471

Bohner G., Gustafsson N., Cade N.I., Maurer S.P., Griffin L.D., Surrey T., Important factors determining the nano-scale tracking precision of microtubule ends Journal of Microscopy, 261, 67-78 (2015); doi: 10.1111/jmi.12316

Maurer S.P., Cade N.I., Bohner G., Gustafsson N., Boutant E., Surrey T., EB1 Accelerates Two Conformational Transitions Important for Microtubule Maturation and Dynamics Current Biology, 24(4), 372-384 (2014); doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.12.042