Imaging ONEWORLD - 'Finding the needle in the haystack with 3D correlative light and electron microscopy' - Dr Lucy Collinson

Scientific Organisers: Stefanie Reichelt, Alex Sossick, Nick Barry, Alessandro Esposito and Kirti Prakash

The meeting will begin at 1pm BST.

As part of the 'Imaging ONEWORLD' series, the focus of these lectures is on microscopy and image analysis methods and how to apply these to your research. Almost all aspects of imaging such as sample preparation, labelling strategies, experimental workflows, ‘how-to’ image and analyse, as well as facilitating collaborations and inspiring new scientific ideas will be covered. Speakers will be available for questions and answers. The organisers, CRUK CI core facility staff, Gurdon Institute, MRC-LMB, MRC Cancer Unit and NPL will be able to continue the discussion and provide advice on your imaging projects.

Speaker

• 

  Dr Lucy Collinson

  Dr Lucy Collinson is an electron microscopist with a background in microbiology and cell biology. She has a degree and PhD in Medical Microbiology, and post-doctoral research investigating membrane trafficking pathways. She has run a series of biological EM facilities since 2004, at UCL and then at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, which became part of the Francis Crick Institute in 2015. With a team of 10 electron microscopists and 3 physicists, she oversees more than 100 research projects with more than 60 research groups within the Crick, imaging across scales from proteins to whole organisms. Her microscopy and technology development interests include volume EM, correlative imaging techniques, cryo-microscopy, X-ray microscopy, image analysis, citizen science, microscope design and prototyping.

Speaker's Abstract

As our ability to image the structure of cells and tissues expands through massive advances in volume electron microscopy (vEM) techniques and technologies, so it is increasingly critical to be able to target temporally and spatially rare events within biological samples. Given the balance between field of view and resolution, vEM volumes are still generally limited to less than 1 mm³, and more often in the hundred microns³ range, whereas the tissue, model organism or biopsy might be in the mm-cm range. In this talk, I will discuss how we approach a ‘needle in the haystack’ imaging experiment, the different sample preparation, image acquisition and analysis strategies that we use, and how we custom-design correlative workflows for different biomedical research questions.