Giuseppe Di Caprio, Ph.D.

My research bridges Optical Microscopy, Biology and Image Processing. I am interested in mechanistic questions addressed at a molecular level aided by fluorescence microscopy imaging acquired with high temporal and spatial resolution. During the past years I focused on problems associated with viral particles endocytosis and fusion processes, in-vitro assembly of clathrin coated pits, the shape of intracellular energy gradients in living cells, Pyrin-mediated inflammasome assembly and activation, and the mechanisms that regulates cell internalization of Transferrin-decorated DNA origami barrels. Aspects of my studies involve close collaborations with other members in the Kirchhausen group and with external collaborators. Most of the imaging is carried using minimally invasive, 3D live-cell lattice light-sheet microscopy (LLSM); I have also been responsible for implementing the construction of one of these microscopes in the Kirchhausen lab as well as developing the computational processing tools used for the quantitative analysis of the data generated by myself and by other members of our group. More recently I have dedicated my attention to a project aimed at performing automated identification of intracellular substructures in volumetric electron microscopy using a deep learning neural network.