{"id":47520,"date":"2022-03-16T09:43:32","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T08:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/?p=47520"},"modified":"2024-03-22T15:27:28","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T14:27:28","slug":"putting-cryptococcus-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/science\/putting-cryptococcus-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting Cryptococcus in context"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Found all over the world, the fungi cryptococcus<\/em> usually doesn\u2019t affect healthy individuals.  However, it sometimes causes severe meningitis in immunocompromised individuals, like people with HIV. Infection usually occurs when people inhale the fungi, spreading it to the lungs and brain, possibly with fatal consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greetje Vande Velde, Research Professor at KU Leuven, has studied cryptococcus<\/em> for almost a decade. How the fungi are able to cross the blood brain barrier is still unknown, and that\u2019s why Vande Velde and Jim Swoger, Head of the Mesoscopic Imaging Facility<\/a> at EMBL Barcelona, started collaborating several years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, Vande Velde was a postdoc at KU Leuven and Swoger still worked in the Sharpe Lab, at the Centre for Genomic Regulation<\/a> (CRG) in Barcelona. She spent a research fellowship in the Sharpe lab to visualise mouse organs in 3D with Swoger, using the recently invented techniques Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) and Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGreetje\u2019s expertise is in 3D in vivo<\/em> imaging, which allows for live observation of disease spread, but it doesn\u2019t allow us to look at cells themselves within the context of organs and tissues,\u201d Swoger said. \u201cOPT and SPIM allow us to image complete mouse organs ex vivo<\/em> at high resolution in 3D and help us see the spatial organisation of the cryptococci.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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