Abstract

My research uses a wide range of imaging approaches, with the aim of understanding the complexities of the cytoskeleton, and microscopy is an important tool in our research. We use both commercial and ‘home built’ instrumentation to perform advanced light microscopy. This includes ‘super-resolution’ imaging approaches such as iSIM (instant structured illumination), STED (stimulated emission depletion) and STORM (stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy). Most recently, we have begun to use lattice light sheet microscopy for long term gentle imaging at high resolution. We also use a wide range of electron microscopy (EM) approaches from scanning EM of cells to negative stain and cryoEM of molecules, with the latter enabling us to generate high resolution structures of molecules (Scarff et al., Nature 2020), and we are developing correlative cryoEM approaches. Our group also exploits small non-antibody binding proteins called ‘Affimers’ in our imaging approaches, which have many advantages over traditional antibodies. I will introduce and explain these different approaches and give examples. I will also give a brief overview on the Royal Microscopical Society, how they support microscopy and how they interact with industry.