Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia

3 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

Engineering

Fabrication of Nano-engineered Transparent Conducting Oxides by Pulsed Laser Deposition

Paolo Gondoni¹, Matteo Ghidelli¹, Fabio Di Fonzo^1,2, Andrea Li Bassi^1,2, Carlo S. Casari¹

¹Department of Energy and NEMAS - Center for NanoEngineered Materials and Surfaces, Politecnico di Milano, ²Center for Nano Science and Technology, Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia

We describe the experimental method to deposit nanostructured oxide thin films by nanosecond Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) in the presence of a background gas. By using this method Al-doped ZnO (AZO) films, from compact to hierarchically structured as nano-tree forests, can be deposited.

Bioengineering

From Fast Fluorescence Imaging to Molecular Diffusion Law on Live Cell Membranes in a Commercial Microscope

Carmine Di Rienzo^1,2, Enrico Gratton³, Fabio Beltram¹, Francesco Cardarelli²

¹NEST Laboratory, Scuola Normale Superiore, ²Center for Nanotechnology Innovation, Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia, ³Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine

Spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of plasma membrane proteins and lipids is a hot topic in biology. Here this issue is addressed by a spatio-temporal image fluctuation analysis that provides conceptually the same physical quantities of single particle tracking, but it uses small molecular labels and standard microscopy setups.

Biology

Probing Structural and Dynamic Properties of Trafficking Subcellular Nanostructures by Spatiotemporal Fluctuation Spectroscopy

Gianmarco Ferri¹, Fabio Azzarello¹, Francesca D'Autilia², Francesco Cardarelli¹

¹NEST Laboratory, Scuola Normale Superiore, ²Center for Nanotechnology Innovation@NEST CNI@NEST

Imaging-derived mean square displacement (iMSD) analysis is applied to macropinosomes to highlight their intrinsic time-evolving nature in terms of structural and dynamic properties. Macropinosomes are then compared to insulin secretory granules (ISGs) as a reference for subcellular structures with time-invariant average structural/dynamic properties.