Charles Uni­ver­sity Prague

Charles Uni­ver­sity Pra­gue was foun­ded in 1348 and is a hub for cut­ting-edge rese­arch and edu­ca­tion in bio­lo­gi­cal and medi­cal sci­en­ces in the Czech Repu­blic. Loca­ted at the 1st Faculty of Medi­cine, the Labo­ra­tory of Advan­ced Opti­cal Micro­scopy is led by Josef Lazar and deve­lops advan­ced tech­ni­ques of opti­cal micro­scopy. The team applies these to gain infor­ma­tion about mecha­nisms of mole­cu­lar pro­ces­ses taking place in living cells and organisms.

The Labo­ra­tory has deve­lo­ped the tech­ni­que of two-pho­ton pola­riza­tion micro­scopy, which allows sen­si­tive obser­va­tions of chan­ges in con­for­ma­tion of mem­brane pro­te­ins. The Laboratory’s mul­ti­di­sci­pli­nary exper­tise in bio­che­mis­try, mole­cu­lar and cell bio­logy, bio­phy­sics, optics, elec­tro­nic engi­nee­ring, com­pu­ter pro­gramming and mathe­ma­ti­cal model­ling allows tack­ling of a wide range of dif­fi­cult sci­en­ti­fic ques­ti­ons, as well as deve­lo­p­ment of new lumi­ne­s­cence-based assay tech­no­lo­gies like UniSens.