Dr. Marco Di Berardino

Affiliation : CTO, Co-founder and Chairman of the Board at Amphasys AG, Technopark Lucerne, Switzerland

Title of the Talk/Lab :The Various Facets of Pollen Analysis by Impedance Flow Cytometry (IFC)

Marco Di Berardino received his Ph.D. in microbiology from the ETH of Zurich (Switzerland) in 1996, working on the structure of bacterial membrane proteins and continuing his research on new antibiotic targets as a postdoc at F. Hoffman-La Roche. He then decided to start an industrial career by developing liquid handling platforms at Qiagen Instruments and Chemspeed. In 2004 he joined the Leister Group, where he started the development of a commercial impedance-based flow cytometer. In 2012 he finally co-founded Amphasys as a spin-off of Leister and focused on the further development and commercialisation of the first impedance flow cytometer, starting with the pollen analysis application for the seed industry.

Since Dr. Di Berardino started his adventure with the development of a commercial impedance flow cytometer, he is devoted to show that IFC deserves higher attention by addressing specific applications that demand the robustness and simplicity of this technology. One of his main ambitions is to provide simple and portable single cell analysis solutions that are needed outside of a laboratory environment.

Lecture: The Various Facets of Pollen Analysis by Impedance Flow Cytometry (IFC): The various facets of pollen analysis by IFC. This lecture will first provide some technical background information about Impedance Flow Cytometry and its working principle. Although the technology can analyze any kind of single cells, this presentation will focus on the different aspects of pollen analysis and reveal why this technology has become a standard method for the determination of pollen viability and evolved to an indispensable tool for the seed industry. Factors affecting the results of the analyses as well as additional information that can be gathered by IFC will also be explored.

Relevant Literature:

• Heidmann I. et al. (2016). Impedance Flow Cytometry: A NovelTechnique in Pollen Analysis. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0165531.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165531
• Heidmann I. and Di Berardino M. (2017). Impedance Flow Cytometry as a Tool to AnalyzeMicrospore and Pollen Quality. Anja Schmidt (ed.), Plant Germline Development: Methods and Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology,vol. 1669, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-7286-9_25, © Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2017
• Canonge J, et al. (2020). Impedance flow cytometry allows the early prediction of embryo yields inwheat (Triticum aestivum L.) microspore cultures. Plant Science 300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plantsci.2020.110586
• Ostermann M. et al. (2020). Label-free impedance flow cytometry for nanotoxicity screening. Nature Scientific Reports 10:142. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56705-3
• Christian Opitz C. et al. (2020). Rapid determination of general cell status, cell viability, and optimalharvest time in eukaryotic cell cultures by impedance flow cytometry. Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-019-10046-3