Myositis is a group of autoimmune inflammatory muscle diseases that cause muscle weakness and degeneration through changes in muscle structure and cellular organisation. While conventional histology has provided important insights into disease pathology, it captures only a small fraction of the tissue and cannot fully resolve the three-dimensional architecture of intact muscle. Whole-organ imaging offers an opportunity to better understand how disease affects tissue organisation at both the cellular and organ scale.
This project will use tissue clearing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy to image intact mouse skeletal muscles from a myositis model. The student will work with relevant biological markers to visualise tissue structures of interest and develop quantitative approaches to characterise disease-associated changes in three dimensions. Image analysis will be used to extract structural and spatial measurements from whole-muscle datasets and compare healthy and diseased tissue.
The student will gain experience in tissue clearing, advanced fluorescence microscopy, 3D image processing, data visualisation, and quantitative image analysis. There is also scope to develop or apply computational methods for automated segmentation and morphometric analysis. This project is well suited to students interested in combining biology with cutting-edge imaging and computational approaches to study disease.
