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Bielefeld University acquires cutting-edge research instrument

With Bielefeld University’s new laser microscope, you can even see individual viruses. Its resolution is sufficient for objects as small as 100 nanometres –the size of such pathogens. The new instrument cost about one million Euros. The Biomolecular Photonics research group at the Faculty of Physics will be using this high-resolution widefield microscope to study transport processes and signal transmissions in living cells. One focus will be on studying how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) spreads through the human body.

The instrument is the most up-to-date version of an optical wide-field microscope manufactured by GE Healthcare, a medical device company. Alongside Munich, Dresden, and Berlin, Bielefeld is now the fourth university in Germany to acquire this microscope. ‘The new microscope enables us to observe and track individual viruses in living cells for the first time ever,’ says Huser. In addition, the microscope can record up to 240 images per second. Afterwards, molecular processes in cells and viruses can be observed in slow motion.

The new microscope should also advance research on the transmission of HIV in the body. ‘Although we have known what causes AIDS for almost 30 years, we have still not managed to develop an effective vaccination. This is not only because the virus is so adaptable but also because of the wide range of transmission pathways on the cellular level. To some extent, the significance of alternate pathways has been underestimated until recently,’ explains Professor Dr. Thomas Huser, head of the Biomolecular Photonics research group.

Together with biologist Dr. Wolfgang Hübner and further colleagues, he is observing how HIV in the infected cells manages to reprogram immune cells and infect other cells in the body. ‘We are conducting fundamental research – in other words, we are developing methods with which to track and analyse fundamental processes on a sub-microscopic scale in living cells. If, for example, we manage to find out exactly how the transmission of the virus actually takes place, then medical scientists and biologists can do further research on the basis of this information and use it to develop treatments.’ They will be studying the direct transmission of the virus from infected to non-infected cells from the end of 2014 onwards in a specially equipped laboratory in the new experimental physics building. Other biomedical questions concerning, for example, how the liver works, should also be studied on a microscopic scale.‘ Such questions can only be solved through interdisciplinary research with physicists first developing new methods and then working together with biologists and medical scientists,’ says Huser.

Physicists in Bielefeld will also be using the new instrument in other projects in which they are collaborating with colleagues from the Faculties of Biology, Chemistry, and Technology at the university as well as colleagues from Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. They are also using it in joint projects with medical scientists from Bad Oeynhausen, Bochum, and Hanover as well as with research groups in Italy, Norway, and the United States.

The new instrument has been financed jointly by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Bielefeld University.

Contakt:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Huser, Universität Bielefeld
Faculty of Physics
Telephone: 0049 521 106-5451
Email: thomas.huser@physik.uni-bielefeld.de