Coming Soon!
As a result of 2 successful applications to BBSRC's ALERT24, medium range equipment funding scheme, we are about to initiate procurement for 2 new instrument systems with a combined cost of over £2 million that will enhance and extend the range of imaging modalities we can offer to our users.
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- A Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) super resolution microscope system. Conventional light microscopy has a hard limit in terms of it's resolving power; how small and close together 2 structures can be and we can still tell them apart. This limit is defined by the laws of physics, rather than by our engineering ability to make good microscopes and it roughly corresponds to half the wavelength of the light being used to create the image. The shortest wavelength of visible light is about 400nm, so the conventional limit of resolution of light microscopy is about 200nm. However, many of our users are investigating intracellular biology, and the structures they need to visualise and analyse are at, or below the limit of resolution, so their research has been restricted by the inability to see the detail that they need. Super resolution microscopy is an umbrella term for a variety of methods that "cheat" the laws of physics and obtain resolutions far better than the conventional limit. It has taken us multiple grant applications since 2019 to try to fund a super resolution system, so we are delighted that we have finally been successful and can soon offer this vital new resource to our users to help advance their research.
- A cryo-fluoresence tomography (CFT) system. CFT is a new development in light microscopy that combines serial block face imaging with multi- channel fluorescence imaging to provide high resolution 3D mapping of probes in animal tissue. It is only supplied by one manufacturer and currently there are only 12 systems installed globally. Ours will be the first open-access system in Europe and is a major coup for the BIU and Southampton and our south coast partners on the bid (Universities of Portsmouth and Sussex and Sussex and Brighton Medical School). It will be of special value in the fields of cancer biology and drug development.