Seminaire de Ignacio Izeddin - ESPCI Paris Institut Langevin, Université PSL

14:00pm, Ecole Polytechnique, Amphi to be announced

Beyond the frame: single-molecule tools for quantitative live-cell biology

Over the past decade, I have developed a series of single-molecule imaging tools and applied them to study molecular organization and dynamics in living cells. While my work has focused primarily on the nucleus, exploring transcriptional regulation and DNA repair mechanisms, these tools are designed to be universal across cellular compartments and biological systems.

In this talk, I will trace key methodological contributions: establishing quantitative single-molecule tracking in the nucleus of live mammalian cells, introducing adaptive optics for aberration-corrected SMLM, developing SPAD-based single-molecule FLIM... I will highlight the biological insights these approaches enabled and the collaborative network through which they have been deployed.

I will close with our most recent direction: EveSMLM, in which we replace conventional cameras with event-based sensors. The shift is conceptual as much as technical: rather than collecting photons over fixed exposure windows, event-based detection responds to asynchronous intensity changes pixel by pixel, turning time from a sampling constraint into an exploitable signal. This enables live-cell SMLM, access to individual molecular emission timelines and, through modulated excitation, both resolution enhancement and spectral multiplexing. More broadly, EveSMLM illustrates a principle I find increasingly compelling: rethinking what the detector measures, rather than simply how well it measures it, opens qualitatively new windows onto biological dynamics.