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.