WIREDGOV

A state-of-the-art £0.9M microscope in the UK is penetrating the deepest secrets of biology’s building blocks, providing the foundation for better medical implants, healthcare treatments and disease-resistant crops. 

Plus, thanks to the UK’s supercomputing capabilities, the huge datasets produced are being made available for detailed analysis by the biological science research teams faster than ever before.

Now fully operational the new microscope harnesses a technique called stimulated emission depletion (STED) to study objects just tens of nanometres wide – much smaller than a cell – adding yet another dimension to the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Central Laser Facility (CLF) and its unique OCTOPUS suite of laser microscopes.

Funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has supported the development and installation of an instrument that uses light to reveal, for instance, the secrets of chromosome structures, how plants defend themselves against pathogens and how artificial nerve grafts and implant materials interact with human cells and proteins.

One major benefit of STED techniques is the ability to study in detail cell components and their workings in real time.

However, a key challenge arises from the huge amounts of digital data generated by super-resolution imaging and the need to collate, integrate and compare it with information produced by the many other techniques used by OCTOPUS. STFC’s supercomputing infrastructure and expertise are being harnessed to achieve this, ensuring that datasets from the STED microscope are collected fast and efficiently and made available for interrogation by research teams using the instrument to push beyond the boundaries of current biological and biotechnological knowledge.

Dr John Runions and his research group at Oxford Brookes University use the new OCTOPUS STED capability to study plant cells – specifically the interaction between the actin cytoskeleton and thecell wall. He says:

"STED provides the high resolving power we need in order to image very fine, growing actin filaments. It allows us to image detail that conventional microscopes simply would not allow us to."

More information

Marion O’Sullivan 
STFC Press Office
Tel: 01235 445627
Mob: 07824 888990

Notes for editors

STFC Central Laser Facility (CLF) at the Research Complex at Harwell is a partnership between its staff and the large number of members of UK and European universities who use the specialised laser equipment provided to carry out a broad range of experiments in physics, chemistry and biology. The CLF’s wide ranging applications include experiments in physics, chemistry and biology, accelerating subatomic particles to high energies, probing chemical reactions on the shortest timescales and studying biochemical and biophysical process critical to life itself.