Name Michal Opas | Education University of Warsaw | |
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Dr. Michal Opas is a research scientist and a Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a graduate of Warsaw University, from where he received his M.Sc., and a Ph.D. from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cell Biology working at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology on the mechanism of amoeboid movement.
Michal Opas' field of expertise is in cell motility and adhesion, cytoskeleton, and their role in stem cell choice of fate. He is a recognized authority in a variety of microscopies. Michal Opas is an author of many peer-reviewed scientific publications on movement of giant amoebae, cell biology, techniques of interference reflection, holographic, fluorescence and confocal microscopies and three-dimensional visualization of cells and tissues. His collaboration with Marek Michalak (University of Alberta) led to identification of calreticulin as major calcium buffer in the endoplasmic reticulum of non-muscle cells, a molecular chaperone and important regulator of cellular differentiation.
Michal Opas was an early proponent of the importance of mechanical integration of cell and its environment (“cytomechanics”), initially a concept considered esoteric, that nevertheless became a cornerstone of understanding of organization and function of cells, tissues and organs. In 1985, a group of scientists comprising architects, biologists, engineers and physicists met in Stuttgart at a meeting sponsored by the Sonderforschungsbereich 230: Naturliche Konstruktionen, Leichtbau in Architektur und Natur, which led to the publication of a book appropriately entitled Cytomechanics. Thus, the field was named.
Opas’ lab interests at present can be referred to as cytomechanics of embryonic stem cell fate commitment and determination during differentiation researched using a variety of in vitro cell and embryoid body culture and microfluidic technologies.
Opas was the final author on a 2008 scientific paper retratcted in 2015 from the Journal of Cell Biology for extensive errors including incorrect and mislabelled data.