GE Healthcare to revolutionise imaging of live cells
Launches super-resolution OMX Blaze imaging system
Applied Precision, a GE Healthcare company, has launched DeltaVision OMX Blaze, a research microscopy system that produces super-resolution with a proprietary, ultra-fast, illumination module and the latest high-speed camera technologies.
The DeltaVision OMX Blaze system’s speed of image acquisition enables researchers to follow tagged proteins within the same living cell, over time, in three-dimensional space, at near molecular resolution.
Dr Amr Abid, general manager of Cell Technologies, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, said: ‘We are only at the beginning of what this technology can do. The ability to follow cellular interactions, over time at the molecular level will open up new frontiers in so many areas of life science research. This is a hugely important step forward for cellular imaging.’
Researchers at the UC Davis-based Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) collaborated early as beta testers for the technology. The system is also being installed at a number of early adopter sites around the world, which are expected to go live in the next two months.
Dr Frank Chuang, associate research director, CBST, said: ‘We’re at the point where we need to understand mechanisms of health and disease at the molecular level. The OMX Blaze has tremendous potential as a research tool, and we are very excited to apply this in our laboratory models to observe the response of cancer cells to chemotherapy, the cell-to-cell transmission of HIV and other viruses, and the dynamics of engineered nanoparticles.’
In the past 10 years, a number of fluorescent microscopy methods have been developed which use computational or optical techniques to exceed the previously assumed limits of optical microscopy.
According to Applied Precision, the DeltaVision OMX super-resolution system uses a technique called 3D-SIM (Structured Illumination Microscopy), which approximately doubles the resolution in all three dimensions, giving an eight times improvement in volume resolution compared with conventional microscopy.
