Building a blood vessel is a cell biology problem as much as a vascular one. Endothelial cells have to remodel their junctions, rearrange their cytoskeleton, and polarize toward a migration cue — all while staying sealed enough to hold blood in. Watching that happen requires tools that reveal specific proteins inside living cells without disturbing how those cells behave.

We build nanobody-based fluorescent reporters — small antibody fragments fused to fluorescent proteins that bind their target inside the living cell — to track proteins such as junctional and cytoskeletal components as vessels form. Paired with CRISPR knock-in reporters and live confocal imaging, this lets us follow the same cell, and the same protein, from one frame to the next inside a living, developing animal.

• Nanobody-based intrabodies for live, endogenous protein tracking
• Subcellular imaging of cell junctions and the cytoskeleton
• CRISPR knock-in reporters tagging genes at their native locus
• Single-cell resolution inside a living, developing animal