Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Understanding how an organism develops is a critical step in understanding how an organism functions. One of the key aspects of understanding animal development requires the ability to watch during development how proteins interact with each other and how they generate signals within and between cells that help coordinate development. A powerful tool to do this is to use fluorescent tags attached to proteins with a live cell or tissue to study development. These tags come in a wide range of colour from blue, green, orange, yellow, red and even far-red. This means that researchers can study many proteins at the same time in a living cell to obtain a clear picture on how these proteins interact and what signals they generate. This means that during nervous system development, how cells migrate or extend processes to their final positions in the nervous system can be investigated. This means that the signals that trigger a cell to migrate in cancer compared to a normal cell can be studied live within the cell. By following how cells move and signal in real time (i.e. live) provides far more information about how development is controlled than traditional approaches that fixed the cell in place. For these approaches imaging these proteins within developing cells or tissues is required. A specialized microscope that uses high magnification but can detect faint signals without killing the cells or bleach the cell is essential. The Deltavision microscope is a system that allows live cells to be imaged for hours without any damage and allows many labels to be followed in the same cell.