A new University College Dublin (UCD) led pan-European research project using correlative multimodal imaging (CMI) to improve the understanding of biomedical processes of disease and drug therapy has secured €2.5 million in funding.
CLEXM (Correlative Light, Electron and X-ray Microscopy), a 4-year project involving 7 partner organisations in 4 countries, has been funded by Horizon Europe under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) programme. The project which officially commences this September will fund nine (9) PhD candidate projects across the partner organisations.
CMI is used by researchers to obtain a composite view of a biological sample with the multidimensional information about its structure, dynamics, function and chemical composition required to understand biomedical processes and diseases.
There is a growing need for disease and drug therapy researchers to better understand the linkages between structural and functional changes that occur in a cell and to be able to observe these from the cellular (micrometre) to the molecular (nanometre) scale. Correlative Light and Electron Microscopy (CLEM) is the current state-of-the-art for achieving this, but the technique is extremely complex and slow.
The overall focus of the 9 CLEXM research projects is to demonstrate that the integration of a third imaging technique, Soft X-ray Tomography (SXT), into CLEM will make it easier and faster for researchers to correlate cellular structure with cellular function.