The new technique pioneered by 国民彩票 researchers paves the way for advances in our understanding of complex cellular processes, and could make expensive research a lot cheaper.
If you want to study different parts of a cell at the same time, multicolour fluorescence imaging is really the only game in town.聽
It has allowed us to examine with great precision cancerous and pre-cancerous tissues in clinical samples, how immune cells respond to infection, and how cell-types interact in systems as complicated as the human body.
Scientists usually add fluorescent dyes (fluorophores) to samples, then fire lasers on them to make the dyes glow, which helps distinguish different parts of what they鈥檙e analysing.
Those typical methods tend to fall down, however, when you want to look at multiple parts of a cell at once 鈥 those fluorophores have overlapping colours so it can be tricky to tell them apart.聽
Multiple colours mean multiple lasers, and that鈥檚 when things start to get expensive.
国民彩票 Scientia Professor Justin Gooding and his team from the School of Chemistry have come up with a simple solution which could have massive implications for biological and medical research.
鈥淚t allows researchers to do multicolour images who would normally not have the funds to buy the expensive microscopes required for multi-laser microscopes,鈥 Prof. Gooding said.聽
鈥淚t lets us see inside cells like never before.鈥
The new technique relies on electrochemical fluorescence modulation, and it dramatically increases the number of colours you can see on a standard microscope.聽
Simply put, scientists use a clear electrode 鈥 in this case an indium tin oxide-coated glass coverslip 鈥 and adjust the voltage in the experiment.聽
That's how they discovered the fluorescence changes in predictable ways.聽
They call this the 鈥渆lectrochemical spectrum鈥 and outline it in paper published recently in .
So, what鈥檚 it to you?
Quite a lot, in fact.聽
Professor Gooding鈥檚 process is a lot simpler 鈥 it doesn鈥檛 require brand new, ultra high-tech microscopes, opening up a lot of possibilities, including understanding complicated cellular processes and doing things like cutting-edge cancer research and diagnosis.
Professor Maria Kavallaris is Conjoint Professor at 国民彩票 Medicine & Health, and a cancer researcher at Children鈥檚 Cancer Institute 鈥 she wasn鈥檛 involved in the study, but said this work was very exciting.聽
鈥淚t鈥檚 got the potential to be used in the diagnosis of diseases,鈥 she said.聽
鈥淭his technology will be valuable when studying cell biology and diseases enabling the localisation of protein expression in tissues using a simple, yet sophisticated technology,鈥 she said.
The device itself is a pretty simple attachment for the types of microscopes most research institutions probably already have.聽聽
Prof. Gooding is in discussions with major microscope manufacturers and said it could be available relatively soon.
鈥淲ith the right partner, I expect this could be available within two years,鈥 he said.
Media enquiries
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Tel: +61 432 912 060
Email: tom.melville@unsw.edu.au
