What we do:
The Truant lab is multidisciplinary and strives to develop a therapy for Huntington’s disease by any means necessary. Our expertise is in Biochemistry, Quantitative Cell biology, and Chemical biology, using techniques of Biophotonics and machine-based learning.
This includes methods like: fluorescence microscopy, laser confocal microscopy, Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) for super-resolution nanoscopy. We also do live cell imaging, Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP), Fluorescent Lifetime Imaging measurement (FLIM) to quantify Forster Resonant Energy Transfer (FRET). Chemical biology is done by fully blinded image acquisition and machine-based sorting and visualization by Principal Component Analysis (PCA), using multiplex, multi-parametric analysis. We also use quantitative imaging and KNIME logistics for data processing. We have a Cell Paint project in HD cells.
Newer methods include use if deep learning algorithms for signal assignment as well as 3D protein modelling with Google Alphafold. New methods and devices are being developed by CAD and 3D printing.
Our biological system is human cells derived from HD patients or control patients that are not transformed to unstable cancer cells. Our major focus is on humans with neurodegeneration.