Lectures and seminars StratNeuro Seminar with Professor Qionghai Dai
Join the StratNeuro Seminar with Professor Qionghai Dai as he presents breakthroughs in mesoscale intravital fluorescence microscopy, revealing large-scale cellular dynamics in living mammalian systems.
Mesoscale Intravital Fluorescence Microscopy
Qionghai Dai
Affiliation: Qionghai Dai is a Professor at Tsinghua University, the Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Dean of the School of Information Science and Technology, and the director of the Institute of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. He is also the chairman of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Biography: Qionghai’s research centers on the interdisciplinary study of optics, informatics, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences, with hundreds of journal papers published in Cell, Nature, Science, etc. Specifically, he has pioneered the development of mesoscale imaging systems and data analysis methods, facilitating simultaneous multiscale intravital observation of biological dynamics spanning organelles, cells, tissues, and organs across different pathological or physiological states at the system level. He is now working on system neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computational imaging, large-scale data analysis methods, and neuromorphic optoelectronic devices.
Biology is a typical discipline covering multiple scales. While cryo-EM and super-resolution imaging enables intracellular imaging of proteins and organelles in microscale, CT and MRI facilitates organ-level imaging in macroscale at tissue resolution. There has long been a missing gap of imaging instruments in mesoscale to observe the large-scale interactions of cells in the native mammalian environment during diverse pathological and physiological states. In this talk, I will introduce our recent developed techniques such as scanning light field microscopy (Wu et al. 2021 Cell), digital adaptive optics (Wu et al. 2022 Nature), two-photon synthetic aperture microscopy (Zhao et al. 2023 Cell), confocal scanning light-field imaging (Lu et al. 2025 Nature Biotechnology) to overcome the barriers of intravital imaging, with orders of magnitude improvement in spatiotemporal resolution, imaging data throughput, and orders of magnitude reduction in phototoxicity for long-term observations (Zhang et al. 2024 Cell). We believe the rapid development of mesoscale imaging opens up a new horizon for the study of large-scale intercellular interactions in mammals, facilitating diverse applications in neuroscience, immunology, oncology, and medicine. While we have exploited some preliminary applications, we believe there is a great treasure awaits discovery.
Selected Publications
1. Jiamin Wu*, Zhi Lu*, Dong Jiang*, Yuduo Guo, Hui Qiao, Yi Zhang, Tianyi Zhu, Yeyi Cai, Xu Zhang, Karl Zhanghao, Hao Xie, Tao Yan, Guoxun Zhang, Xiaoxu Li, Zheng Jiang, Xing Lin, Lu Fang, Bing Zhou, Peng Xi, Jingtao Fan, Qionghai Dai. "Iterative tomography with digital adaptive optics permits hour-long intravital observation of 3D subcellular dynamics at millisecond scale", Cell (2021).
2. Jiamin Wu*, Yuduo Guo*, Chao Deng*, Anke Zhang, Hui Qiao, Zhi Lu, Jiachen Xie, Lu Fang, Qionghai Dai. "An integrated imaging sensor for aberration-corrected 3D photography", Nature (2022).
3. Zhifeng Zhao*, Yiliang Zhou*, Bo Liu*, Jing He*, Jiayin Zhao, Yeyi Cai, Jingtao Fan, Xinyang Li, Zilin Wang, Zhi Lu, Jiamin Wu, Hai Qi, Qionghai Dai. "Two-photon synthetic aperture microscopy for minimally invasive fast 3D imaging of native subcellular behaviors in deep tissue", Cell (2023)
4. Yuanlong Zhang*, Mingrui Wang*, Qiyu Zhu*, Yuduo Guo, Bo Liu, Jiamin Li, Xiao Yao, Chui Kong, Yi Zhang, Yuchao Huang, Hai Qi, Jiamin Wu‡, Zengcai V. Guo‡, Qionghai Dai‡. “Long-term mesoscale imaging of 3D intercellular dynamics across a mammalian organ”, Cell (2024).
5. Yuanlong Zhang*, Lekang Yuan*, Qiyu Zhu*, Jiamin Wu, Tobias Nöbauer, Rujin Zhang, Guihua Xiao, Mingrui Wang, Hao Xie, Zengcai Guo, Qionghai Dai‡, Alipasha Vaziri‡. “A miniaturized mesoscope for the large-scale single-neuron-resolved imaging of neuronal activity in freely behaving mice”, Nature Biomedical Engineering (2024).
6. Zhi Lu*, Siqing Zuo*, Minghui Shi*, Jiaqi Fan, Jingyu Xie, Guihua Xiao, Li Yu, Jiamin Wu, Qionghai Dai. "Long-term intravital subcellular imaging with confocal scanning light-field microscopy", Nature Biotechnology (2025).
7. Jiaqi Fan*, Yuling Wang*, Lingbo Li*, Jing He, Zhifeng Zhao, Fei Deng, Guochuan Li, Xinyang Li, Yiliang Zhou, Jiayin Zhao, Ning Huang, Yixin Hu, Yulong Li, Jiamin Wu, Lu Fang, Qionghai Dai. "Prominent involvement of acetylcholine dynamics in stable olfactory representation across the Drosophila brain", Nature Communications (2025).