My work is with the membrane dynamics of transcytosis in capillary endothelial cells.
Endothelial cells are fairly flat and pancake-shaped.
They are rolled into a cylindrical shape and joined together by intercellular junctions to form the capillaries of the vasculature. As such, they provide the principal barrier to the exchange of materials between the blood and tissues. DIC is used to locate cell borders in confluent monolayers as well as large membranous regions of cytosol, and fluorescence is used to track the distribution of a variety of markers. Image-Pro Plus is central to this work and it has compressed the time necessary to get this system up and running and providing the needed results. At the lowest level, IPP enables reasonable control of the integrating CDD array camera used to acquire images and it provides convenient file control.