The University of Warwick has been awarded approximately £1.3 million by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to install two advanced imaging platforms, following a double success in the funder's ALERT25 call.
The new equipment will give researchers across Warwick Medical School, the School of Life Sciences, Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics the tools to observe biology as it happens, at the level of individual cells and the molecules within them.
Mapping gene activity in space
A team led by Dr Maëlle Lorvellec, of the Computational and Advanced Microscopy Development Unit (CAMDU), and Professor Karuna Sampath secured around £370,000 for an in situ spatial transcriptomics system.
The platform shows where hundreds to thousands of genes are active within tissue, at subcellular resolution. It can be used across the plant, microbe and animal models studied at Warwick, helping researchers understand gene expression in development and physiology across the life course.
Seeing cells at the highest resolution, in real time
A second team, led by Dr Darius Köster with Dr Falk Schneider and CAMDU's Dr David Corcoran, was awarded around £950,000 for a cross-scale imaging platform.
The instrument combines stimulated emission depletion (STED) super-resolution imaging with deep tissue imaging and advanced fluorescence spectroscopy, allowing researchers to follow the workings of cells and organisms in real time at very fine detail.
Dr Darius Koester, Associate Professor and Director of CAMDU at Warwick Medical School said: "These new machines will expand the capabilities of CAMDU significantly and will strengthen our position as a world class imaging facility. These microscopes will enable new exciting science by studying the organisation and dynamics of molecular motors during cell division, the nanoscale organisation of adhesion molecules between cells within a tissue or the spatial regulation of gene expression during development of organisms."
