Bioimagen

One of the priorities of the centre is to strengthen our bioimage capabilities. A bioimaging platform has been recently established to capitalise on the recent acquisition of advanced electron and light microscopy equipment, by launching novel research endeavours that exploit the power of integrative and correlative bioimaging techniques.

Efforts have been carried out to integrate multi-scale and multi-resolution approaches to 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 Advanced Light Microscopy facility (which has recently benefited from the acquisition of state-of-the-art instrumentation that largely expands mesoscopy and functional imaging capabilities), the Electron Microscopy facility and the Cryoelectron Microscopy facility, the latter offering a wide range of techniques for which it is a pioneer in Spain.

Among others, single particle analysis, cryoelectron tomography, cryocorrelative microscopy (the combined use of cryolight microscopy, cryoscanning electron microscopy and cryotransmission electron microscopy) and very recently, cryoelectron diffraction, a very useful technique for the structural determination of crystalline structures of organic and biological molecules, has been offered to the national and international communities.

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, a Quantitative Image Analysis Unit has been created. In the case of cryoelectron microscopy, the Instruct Cryoimage Processing Center (I2PC) and the above mentioned Cryoelectron microscopy are the only Spanish facilities belonging to INSTRUCT, the European network of structural biology facilities. I2PC provides continuous support to data processing and has been involved in the organisation of several practical courses at the international level.

Associated to this bioimaging effort is the development and application of single molecule biophysics techniques. The CNB hosts a good infrastructure and it has been organised as part of the Single Molecule Optical Spectroscopy technique.