Imaging and Pathology

Imaging & Pathology Facility Manager: Dr David Dinsdale

Summary of Research Interests

The Imaging & Pathology group is currently responsible for the characterisation of morphological/functional changes in cells and tissues provided by other groups within the Unit. These studies involve histological and ultrastructural procedures for tissue samples together with various techniques for examining both living and processed cells after isolation.

High content screening and high content analysis enables rapid evaluation of changes in the size, shape, labelling- intensity and other properties of adherent cells whereas the combination of flow-cytometric analysis with the physical sorting of isolated cells has been found to be particularly valuable to groups needing to compare defined cell populations.

More detailed information on individual cells and tissue samples is provided by light-, fluorescent- and confocal-microscopy. Some of these fluorescent molecules used in confocal-microscopy, together with constitutive proteins have been localised using immunogold cytochemistry at the ultrastructural level. We also have considerable experience in autoradiography, cytochemistry, energy-dispersive X-ray microanalysis, microinjection, negative staining and scanning electron microscopy.

Image analysis has proved to be valuable in speeding-up simple procedures, such as cell counting, but also the more complex tasks of stereology, 3-D rendering, and deconvolution.