Under a Pale Grey (Heidelberg) Sky!

I went on a trip to EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratories) in Heidelberg, Germany last week as part of a collaboration with one of the researcher groups in Leeds. The idea was to organise the shipping of a library for performing high content screens on membrane proteins associated with cancer signalling within the facility. The Advance Light Microscopy Facility (ALMF) in EMBL is one of the main development and light microscopy facilities in the world, run by Prof Reiner Pepperkok. It was a bit of a geek trip but I loved it; like a kid in a sweet shop! The guys who looked after me were brilliant too – happy to discuss all aspects of imaging, image analysis and facility management. Thanks so much to Jutta, Faba and Reiner for being so generous with their time during their clearly very busy days.

I landed in Frankfurt under fairly grim grey skies, having been delayed due to snow fall in Frankfurt that morning. Cold too! The next day was much clearer with a nice 30 min walk from the guest house up to the laboratory.

The morning walk to the lab from the guest house!

Mecca?!

What a place! They pretty much have every commercially available imaging system there from Zeiss laser scanning confocals, Perkin Elmer spinning discs and a Delta Vision RT. They also have the capability for lifetime imaging (FLIM) and fluorescence correlative spectroscopy (FCS). Allied with that is their high content screening system service/ facility. They developed this system in house and it was, until recently, sold by Olympus as their ScanR system. They have a fantastic set up with four of these systems set up in a single room continually acquiring data from multiwell plates. Many of the screens are being performed in live cells with fluorescent proteins used to tag various structures within the cells and images being captured every 10 mins for 48 hours in studies linked to elucidating genes involved in cell division. One of the major studies performed within the facility has been MitoCheck, a screen to identify genes that regulate the passage of cells through the cell cycle. Currently they have over 20 projects running at various stages within the facility!

A summary of what they do at ALMF

They perform their screens in 384 well plates and have found the only really efficient method for handling cell culture is through robotics. Manually seeding cells into tiny wells on a 384 plate is both ridiculously time consuming (each library can have up to eighty 384 well plates; that's a lot of pipetting!!) and leads to very high levels of inconsistency in both cell and assay performance. They also generate 384-spotted Labtec slides for screens which they utilise a BioRad spotter.

One of the neat tools in the facility was a robotic drug dispenser that is coordinated through the acquisition software and enables exact amounts of drugs to be added to specific wells at the appropriate time. This was based on their Leica SP5 confocal. The one massive advantage they have is the provision of a highly accomplished workshop; a number of design patents seem to come from it ranging from the use of robotics to building bespoke environmental chambers for the microscopes.

After spending only a day there I will have to try and enroll on one of their courses to spend more time in the facility, gain their knowledge and see Heidelberg; its got a great castle which I didn't see this time unfortunately, next time...