Establishing a feeder EM facility for South Parks Road, Oxford

The cell is the fundamental unit of all life and our understanding of how it functions is about to be transformed. This will set the stage for a big change in medicine and biotechnology, as well as being likely to be the basis of whole new industries. It will be similar to the molecular biology revolution of the 20th century. These changes are being catalysed by many advances, but the most direct technological revolution has been in cryo-electron microscopy. In the last two years a convergence of a newly powerful electron microscopes, new direct electron detectors and new algorithms for image analysis have closed the longstanding ‘resolution gap’ between atomic structures and the limits of resolution available from light microscopy. It is now possible to look directly at molecules with an electron microscope and rapidly solve their atomic structure. Even more revolutionary, tomographic methods allow direct imaging of the internal machinery of cells at the level of single molecules.

This project will allow researchers to establish a microscopy facility where they can apply this new technique to research questions ranging from infection and immune responses to fundamental processes involved in cell division.