ERC 2022: two laureates from Université Paris-Saclay selected from the reserve lists

Sandrine Lévêque-Fort is a CNRS research director at the Orsay Institute for Molecular Sciences (ISMO – Univ. Paris-Saclay/CNRS). She has been awarded an Advanced ERC grant for her project TimeNanoLive, which began on 1 November 2023.

Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of the start-up, Abbelight, which develops fluorescence optical microscopy instruments for biological research, Sandrine Lévêque-Fort was awarded the 2020 Irène Joliot-Curie prize in the “Women, research and business” category.

Her winning project, TimeNanoLive for Time-based single molecule nanolocalization for live cell imaging, explores the development of super-resolution optical microscopy, a technique which aims to accurately reproduce the three-dimensional structure of proteins in cells and tissues. While current approaches based on the localisation of individual fluorescent molecules allow for observations on the nanometre scale, the current localisation process of these molecules, which is based on the analysis of a large number of acquired images, is slow and often limited to the observation of non-living cells. TimeNanoLive aims to revolutionise localisation by using a specific structured illumination to encode the 3D position of fluorescent molecules with increased spatial and temporal resolution.

This approach shifts the localisation step to illumination, meaning that the detection strategy can be redesigned. Conventional cameras are replaced by new detectors, providing faster acquisition and new information about the environment of fluorescent molecules. The observation of living cells in real-time and on the nanometre scale will give insights into the temporal evolution or intracellular structures and their functions, paving the way for a better understanding of various diseases.