Description: Feedback-based confocal tracking of single fluorescent particles/molecules through 3D space in complex, heterogeneous environments.
Ananthanarayanan was awarded the Royal Microscopical Society Life Sciences Award in 2025 for the use of novel microscopies in cell biology. Her group images individual motor proteins — dynein, kinesin — and the mitochondria they transport, in living cells, at single-molecule sensitivity, combining light-sheet and TIRF-class imaging with particle tracking to ask how organelle positioning and mitochondrial dynamics are controlled. The methodological emphasis is on getting single-molecule sensitivity inside a live cell rather than in vitro, which is the hard version of the problem. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — this is the closest thing at UNSW to a biological end-user for an in-cell quantum sensor: the mitochondrial systems she studies are precisely where NV nanodiamond thermometry and free-radical relaxometry at pT/sqrt(Hz) have been aimed, and she has the live-cell imaging infrastructure to validate any such measurement independently.
Treussart uses fluorescent nanodiamonds (NV centres) as photostable bio-probes: intracellular single-particle tracking, nanoscale thermometry/magnetometry, and multimodal biosensing in cells and organisms, alongside super-resolution imaging - a direct NV-ensemble-to-biology bridge. In the broader landscape of NV-centre ensemble quantum sensing (DEER, nano-NMR, T1 relaxometry) operating near pT/sqrt(Hz) sensitivity, this work is applied here to living cells via nanodiamond probes.
Yang's experimental physical chemistry lab designs new instrumentation to track single proteins, nanoparticles, and other emitters in three dimensions in real time within complex, heterogeneous environments, including a recent time-gated two-photon platform for high-speed 3D single-particle tracking. His group applies these single-molecule tracking and orientation-resolved imaging tools to protein conformational dynamics, functional nanostructures, and active-matter systems.