We are pleased to host a webinar celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science! Our guest speaker, Dr. Niculina Musat, will show how NanoSIMS provides single‑cell insights into microbial activity within complex communities.
Microbes drive Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, yet most cannot be cultured, limiting our understanding of their true ecological functions. NanoSIMS overcomes this by delivering quantitative, single‑cell measurements of element uptake at nanometer resolution. Combined with SIP and FISH, it enables direct tracing of carbon, nitrogen, water, and other elements into taxonomically identified cells.
This webinar will introduce key NanoSIMS methods, recent advances, and practical considerations—from sample preparation to multimodal imaging. Case studies will demonstrate how NanoSIMS captures nutrient and water fluxes across trophic levels and reveals microbial functions inaccessible to conventional approaches.
▶️ "Imaging Microbial Life at the Nanoscale: How NanoSIMS Reveals Single-Cell Function"
📅 February 12, 2026 - 10 AM CET (Paris)
⭐ Key learnings will include:
- Identifying functional traits of uncultured microorganisms
- Understanding microbe–microbe and microbe–host interactions
- Tracking nutrient and water fluxes across trophic levels
- Revealing processes invisible to traditional methods
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🎙️ About the speaker:
Dr. Niculina Musat is a pioneer in applying nano-scale Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (NanoSIMS) at the single-cell level in environmental microbiology, integrating phylogenetic identification with metabolic activity through advanced imaging and isotopic labeling approaches. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from the University of Bucharest, Romania and completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the University of Bremen, Germany. She led the NanoSIMS platform at the Max Planck Institute and the ProVIS imaging facility at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmen-tal Research, Germany, where she developed innovative NanoSIMS-based methods to study microbial function. Since 2023, she is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, focusing on microbial metabolic interactions in anoxic environments. |