In the News
NCMIR Represented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2004
NCMIR researcher Dr. Diana L. Price, pictured above, presented her findings about the Parkinsonian mouse brain at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2004.
August 2, 2004, Savannah , GA — The annual Microscopy and Microanalysis conference featured NCMIR researchers demonstrating advances in imaging techniques.
Dr. Diana L. Price's poster presentation, titled "Application of a Multi-Photon High-Resolution Large-Scale Montage Imaging Technique to Characterize Transgenic Mouse Models of Human Neurodisorders," won this year's M&M Traveling Poster Award.
The study revealed neuropathology in the hippocampus and cerebellum of the Parkinsonian mouse brain, two areas often overlooked in Parkinson's disease research. The labor-intensive nature of traditional imaging methods often restricts research to regions of the brain expected to exhibit pathology, such as the substantia nigra and striatum. But Price's method, which produced high-resolution images using a montaging technique in conjunction with multi-photon microscopy, allowed examination across multiple brain regions.
Price's co-authors include Sunny K. Chow, Hiroyuki Hakozaki, Van Phung, Benjamin Smarr, Steven Peltier, Maryann E. Martone, and Mark H. Ellisman.
Dr. James Bouwer presented a tomography method that, when applied to intermediate voltage electron microscopy (IVEM), dramatically enhances image resolution and reduces chromatic aberration in thick sections compared to standard unfiltered transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques. These improvements in resolution extend the utility of the IVEM by increasing the usable thickness of selectively stained samples that can be imaged.
Bouwer and his co-authors presented their findings in a poster titled "Automated Most-Probable Loss (MPL) Tomography of Thick Selectively Stained Biological Specimens With Quantitative Measurement of Resolution Improvement." Co-authors include Mason R. Mackey, Albert Lawrence, Thomas J. Deerinck, Ying Z. Jones, Masako Terada, Maryann E. Martone, Steven Peltier, and Mark H. Ellisman.
Also presenting was Dr. Guido Gaietta, who delivered a biological sciences tutorial addressing molecular tagging with fluorescent probes, a technique that gives researchers the capability to follow a target protein in the living cell, examine its interactions with other proteins, and study its function. Titled "Molecular Tags: A Multi-Color, Multi-Scale Approach to Recombinant Protein Analysis," the tutorial provided a general overview of two tagging systems: GFP (and its variants) and 4Cys/FlAsH. The basics of each system and their applications to confocal, 2-photon, and electron microscopy also were explored.
