Today, Federico Barabas defended his doctoral thesis “Nanoscopía de fluorescencia por localización estocástica de moléculas individuales” at the Physics Department of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, obtaining the highest honors.
We highly appreciate the evaluation by the jury: Prof. Dr. Francisco Barrantes, Prof. Dr. Hernán Grecco, and Prof. Dr. Gabriel Bilmes.
In his thesis, Federico Barabas built and applied a STORM (Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Mircroscopy) nanoscope. He first made a research stay at the laboratories of Prof. Stefan Hell at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where had the chance to work with Dr. Mark Bates, one the inventors of STORM. He applied the acquired knowledge to design and construct a multi-color STORM nanoscope at CIBION. Federico not only took care of the optical aspects but also of the necessary software to control the instruments, acquire the data, and analyze the reconstructed images, which he made in an open-source platform.
Then, Federico applied the STORM nanoscope to obtain new insight into two biological questions: i) the nanoscale distribution of proteins on the outer membrane of Trypanosoma cruzi, and ii) structural details of the neuronal cytoskeleton during neuronal development and polarization.
The doctoral thesis of Federico Barabas is an outstanding contribution to the implementation of fluorescence nanoscopies in Argentina.
