High content screening microscope with life cell imaging unit

• Subject Area: Basic Research in Biology and Medicine
• Term: Funded in 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440386083

For many years, the Willbold group has been investigating a wide variety of questions in in vitro cell cultures. These include studies on signalling pathways in autophagy or the elucidation of the mode of action of drug candidates developed by Willbold group for the therapy of neurodegenerative diseases. With the currently available instrumentation, these projects are limited in terms of experimental design. Living cells cannot be assayed for longer than a couple of minutes, since all microscopes in the institute lack a life cell imaging unit, which provides a constant temperature of 37 °C at 5 % CO2. Without this unit, the cells are therefore under stress at the time of analysis, which negates the significance of the results obtained. Time-dependent analysis, e. g. of vesicle transport processes, absolutely requires a microscope with a life cell imaging unit. A confocal system is mandatory as well, since it allows Z-stacking and minimizes background fluorescence from out-of-focus light. Moreover, all applications benefit from a high degree of automation, high throughput and high speed. Especially, the diagnostic sFIDA (surface-based fluorescence intensity distribution analysis) technology requires an automated microscope for high throughput screening of large sample numbers. The existing devices do not meet these requirements in any way. The applied high-throughput microscope with life cell imaging unit is therefore essential for the projects of the Willbold group.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: Hochdurchsatz-Mikroskop mit Lebendzell-Analyse-Einheit
• Instrumentation Group: 5042 Mikroskope für Hochdurchsatz und Screening
• Applicant Institution: Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
• Leader: Professor Dieter Willbold, Ph.D.