Sheng Liu
Clemson University, SC·Biophysics
Proteins in living cells constantly move, pair up, separate and cluster, and these interactions drive signaling and transport in both health and disease. Many of these events happen too fast and at too small a scale for standard microscopes to follow.
- Fields
Biophysics
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
single-particle tracking
single molecule localization microscopy
super-resolution microscopy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2030
What they work on
- Build a two-color, high-speed single-particle tracking microscope based on real-time tracking methods like MINFLUX, which can follow two different molecules at once with high spatial and time resolution.
- Apply the two-color tracking system to watch epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a growth-signaling protein and cancer drug target, form and break apart dimers in live cells.
- Develop a deep neural network framework for single molecule localization microscopy that extracts the point spread function and locates molecules simultaneously, enabling accurate analysis without expert tuning.
More about the research
Much of how they work in their natural setting therefore remains unclear. This project develops new microscopes and data-analysis methods to watch single protein molecules with higher speed and sharper resolution.
Why it matters
Faster, sharper tools for watching single proteins could clarify how signaling and transport work inside living cells, including EGFR, a receptor targeted by anticancer therapies. Expert-free analysis software could make super-resolution microscopy more robust and accurate. This could help establish it as a standard structural biology tool between electron and confocal microscopy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William E Moerner
Stanford University, CA·Biophysics
Develop a 3D super-resolution microscope that images over a large depth range using pupil-plane phase patterns and a tilted light sheet, for single-molecule imaging and tracking in living cells.
Mark Siemens
University of Denver, CO·Physics
Develop DeepSpiral, a super-resolution microscope that combines multiphoton excitation with single-molecule localization microscopy to image molecules at the nanometer scale up to 300 microns deep in living brain tissue.
Darrell Irvine
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biology
Train cancer researchers from middle and high school through postdoctoral and junior faculty levels through cancer-focused courses, mentoring, conference support, seminars, retreats and pipeline programs at the Koch Institute.
The school
Clemson University: 19 labs on PI Pages, $339M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
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