Biophotonic optical platform
The BioCOP project stems from the strategic partnership between the Rosalind Franklin Institute (RFI) and the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (KIR) at the University of Oxford. It aims to establish the first of its kind high-performance co-incidence and correlation imaging over multiple length- and time-scales.
Illustration of the BioCOP microscope (credit: Prof Eric Betzig, Janelia Farm)
This unique system combines rapid high-throughput three-dimensional Lattice Light Sheet Microscopy (LLSM) and super-resolution 3D Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) in a single optical platform enabling minimally invasive systematic imaging of nanoscale process in microfluidic organs on a chip across timescales. The platform also takes advantage of adaptive optics for compensating the optical aberrations caused by the biomimetic microfluidic chip. The setup will be used for large-field-of-view-imaging of hundreds of immune and target cells in a biology-tunable and mechanically-adjustable tissue microenvironment hosted in the microfluidic chips with an aim to uncover the mechanisms, the role of physics, and the early and long-term signaling events in health and disease. Having followed the cells at tunable spatiotemporal scales spanning over a period from days to weeks, they will be isolated and analyzed using an automated optical tweezer technology integrated in the platform for single cell analysis approaches.
Contact Dr Narain Karedla and Prof. Marco Fritzsche.