At this years EMBO/EMBL Symposium: Seeing is believing- Imaging the Processes of Life, that took place October 3-6 in Heidelberg, Germany, Alex Bondar from the department of cell biology of INSB was awarded a hounorable mention for his poster entitled "G protein signalling studied by two-photon polarization microscopy"

Alex Bondar, who is a PhD student enrolled in biophysics at the University of South Bohemia and elaborating his thesis in the department of cell biology of INSB under the supervision of Dr. Josef Lazar, presented a poster titled "G protein signalling studied by two-photon polarization microscopy" at the EMBO/EMBL symposium "Seeing is believing - Imaging the Processes of Life" held in Heidelberg on October 3-6 2013. The symposium was attended by many world-renown scientists in the field of microscopy such as Stefan Hell, Eric Betzig and Jeniffer Lippincott-Schwarz. His poster was awarded an "Honourable mention" as the 5th best poster out of 175 posters presented at the conference. The poster describes the effort to apply the technique of two-photon polarization microscopy (2PPM) developed in INSB to studies of interactions between parts of the G protein signalling cascade. His work demonstrates that 2PPM allows observing interactions among G protein-coupled receptors and Gi/o protein subunits, and monitoring G protein activation with higher sensitivity than resonance energy transfer methods using a single fluorescent tag. Additionally, he also shows that in many cases one-photon polarization microscopy can serve as a promising more affordable alternative to 2PPM.