One of the priorities of the Severo Ochoa Programme is to strengthen the bioimage capabilities of the CNB. Along these lines, a bioimaging platform has been established to capitalize on the recent acquisition of advanced electron and light microscopy equipment by launching novel research endeavors that exploit the power of integrative and correlative bioimaging techniques. The goal is to integrate all the CNB efforts to carry out multi-scale and multi-resolution approaches that will cover the whole range of resolution from gross anatomy down to single cell, molecular and atomic scales. A strong coordination will be promoted among the Optical Microscopy, Electron Microscopy and Cryoelectron Microscopy facilities thanks to the establishment of a workflow of Correlative Microscopy techniques.
A major challenge associated to the bioimaging platform is the need for robust algorithms and user-friendly data analysis pipelines, capable to extract meaningful information from a massive amount of data generated by single molecule, light and electron microscopy imaging experiments in virus, bacteria, plants, animal and human cells. In the case of optical microscopy, and to overcome this bottleneck, we have created a Bioimaging Data Analysis Unit. In the case of cryoelectron microscopy, the Instruct Cryoimage Processing Center, the only Spanish facility belonging to INSTRUCT, the European network of structural biology facilities, provides continuous support to data processing.
Associated to this bioimaging effort is the development and application of single molecule biophysics techniques. The CNB hosts a good infrastructure and part of it has been organized as part of the Single Molecule Optical Spectroscopy Unit.