Title: Swarming Bacteria and Diffusing Particles High-Throughput Analysis of Microscopic 3D Motion

 

Presenter: Peter Lu, Department of Physics, Harvard University

 

Time: Oct. 25th, 2010, 16:00 PM

 

Location: A 205 Meeting Room, New Chemistry Building, Peking University

 

Hosted by Yanyi Huang ( yanyi@pku.edu.cn)

 

Summary of the Talk:

 

Ever since the 1827 discovery of Brownian motion by observing pollen grains, quantifying motion under the microscope has led to breakthroughs in physics, biology and engineering. Here, I present methods we have developed using confocal microscopy to deduce 3D structure and dynamics from 2D image sequences. We analyze the motion of diffusing colloidal particles and swarms of bacteria free to swim in 3D, which we observe at the single-organism level. We rely heavily on GPU computing to process our large data sets, making extensive use of NPP, CuFFT and optical-flow CUDA algorithms originally developed for machine vision in automobiles.

 

Selected Publication of Dr. Peter Lu

 

1，Peter J. Lu, Emanuela Zaccarelli, Fabio Ciulla, Andrew B. Schofield, Francesco Sciortino and David A. Weitz,

 

“Gelation of particles with short-range attraction,” Nature 453, 499-503 (2008).

 

2，Luca Bindi, Paul J. Steinhardt, Nan Yao and Peter J. Lu, “Natural Quasicrystals,” Science 324, 1306-1309 (2009).

 

3，Peter J. Lu and Paul J. Steinhardt, “Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture,” Science 315, 1106-1110 (2007).

 

4，Peter J. Lu, “Early Precision Compound Machine from Ancient China,” Science 304, 1638 (2004).

 

5，Peter J. Lu, Motohiro Yogo and Charles R. Marshall, “Phanerozoic Marine Biodiversity Dynamics in light of the Incompleteness of the Fossil Record,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 2736-2739 (2006).