Boyer Lab
Principal Investigator: Laurie A Boyer
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT ABSTRACT Light microscopy is uniquely advantageous in biomedical research due to its speed, resolution, and noninvasiveness, but it is unable to visualize dynamic processes occurring deep within tissues, hindering our ability to fully understand complex, multilayered biological information in a native context. Live imaging of intact tissue is universally hindered by light scattering across all forms of optical microscopy and tissue types. Despite decades of work toward improving imaging depth with new hardware designs, computational methods, and optical probes, scattering remains a broad limitation in biomedical studies because these methods have not addressed the core problem of refractive index (RI) mismatching between the aqueous and lipid fractions of cells. Traditional methods for reducing light scattering such as immersing tissues in high-RI solutions or using clearing agents, are limited to fixed or ex vivo samples and cannot be applied to living tissues without compromising viability. To overcome this technology roadblock, this proposal details an innovative and iterative strategy to combine AI-driven design of synthetic high RI proteins (Aim 1), to systematically c…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01GM164515-01: Design and optimization of high refractive index proteins for deep tissue imaging in living biological systems (2026)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com