Izzy Jayasinghe Harnesses Cutting-Edge Microscopy to Image Cells

ABOVE: © STUART ROBINSON
Asked what initially drew her to science, Izzy Jayasinghe has a modest answer. “I wasn’t very good at very many other things in school,” she says. “And I had, I guess, a general curiosity.” While in high school in New Zealand, Jayasinghe built a viscoelastic damper, a type of shock absorber used in cars and in buildings in earthquake-prone areas, and tested how various design parameters affected its performance. 
The project won an award at a science fair for the city of Auckland, with a prize of a small scholarship to the University of Auckland, where she studied biomedicine beginning in 2003. During her senior year, Jayasinghe worked in the lab of biophysicist Christian Soeller, using a confocal microscope to examine the positions of proteins known as sodium-calcium exchangers in heart cells. Previous research had produced conflicting results on whether these exchangers colocalized with another type of protein known as ryanodine receptors. By eliminating some of the resolution-limiting optical effects, Jayasinghe and her colleagues found that the sodium-calcium exchangers were located both inside and outside clusters of ryanodine receptors. “It was a really nice challenge in the sense that it was a good chance to understand and push the capabilities of the instrument that we were using. . . . It was really exciting,” she says. 

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