In partnership, the Francis Crick Institute, IGC and Imperial College London receive a prestigious Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) award to develop accessible technology helping researchers understand protein behaviour within cells at the nanoscale.

The project “VP-CLEM-KIT: a pipeline for democratising volumetric visual proteomics” led by Lucy Collinson (Crick Institute), Ricardo Henriques (IGC) and Paul French (Imperial College London) has received £2.7million in funding. Together, these teams will create a new toolkit for a type of visual proteomics, which combines two imaging techniques: super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy. The integration of these two technologies holds the promise to unveil never before seen details on the molecular architecture of cells. A key focus of this project will be to generate accessible imaging approaches, easily available to researchers at low cost, particularly those in countries where scientific funding is less accessible.

The joint project between these three teams is planned to start in 2021 and run for 2.5 years. The project will make Visual Proteomics (VP) a reality through cross-disciplinary technological advances in high-resolution microscopy. Ricardo Henriques, a team leader in this project, remarks, “Developing this cutting-edge platform, in an accessible manner, will shape the way many researchers will want to do research in the next decade. For this reason, we have prioritised building the technology in a democratised form, ensuring its fully open access by researchers interested in life and biomedical sciences”. In the future, these teams expect the VP-CLEM-KIT to become a vital component of the approaches researcher will use to make seminal discoveries in health and disease.