My name is Mariana De Niz. I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Lisbon, Portugal. My work focuses on understanding the biophysics and dynamics of the parasite Trypanosoma brucei (causative of sleeping sickness), in various tissues of mammalian hosts. I am particularly interested in microscopy methods to image host-parasite interactions, and am keen on developing new methods that enable visualising and investigating these interactions. In my PhD and first postdoc, I worked on investigating various stages of the malaria-causative parasite Plasmodium. I was particularly interested in understanding parasite tropism and mechanisms of sequestration during Plasmodium blood stages, and host cell organelle manipulation during Plasmodium liver stage development.
Segmentation of the Zebrafish Brain Vasculature from Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy Datasets
The effect of absent blood flow on the zebrafish cerebral and trunk vasculature
Viscoelastic relaxation of collagen networks provides a self-generated directional cue during collective migration
DMD-based super-resolution structured illumination microscopy visualizes live cell dynamics at high speed and low cost
Conservation of the Toxoplasma conoid proteome in Plasmodium reveals a cryptic conoid feature that differentiates between blood- and vector-stage zoites
Surface area-to-volume ratio, not cellular rigidity, determines red blood cell traversal through small capillaries
Expansion Microscopy provides new insights into the cytoskeleton of malaria parasites including the conservation of a conoid
An open-source experimental framework for automation of cell biology experiments
Actomyosin forces and the energetics of red blood cell invasion by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum
Collective ERK/Akt activity waves orchestrate epithelial homeostasis by driving apoptosis-induced survival
