On April 18th & 19th members of the CoCID consortium gathered at Levi, Finland for the 4th in-person consortium meeting. Twenty participants representing each of the seven CoCID partners presented their research updates.
SiriusXT kick-started the meeting by describing the latest technical improvements to the SXT-100 microscope, including efficiency improvements to microscope workflow as well as the first results from the testing of glass capillaries as an alternative sample holder for SXT.
Dimitri Scholz UCD spoke about recent progress in the development of a correlative CLEM-SXT (“CLEXM”) workflow as well as plans to build a novel fluorescent microscope for imaging tissue sections. Axel Ekman from JYU described his recently developed automated image alignment workflow that is now routinely employed at SiriusXT to quickly align SXT projection in a manner that does not require fiducial markers. This greatly speeds up and simplifies this key data processing step. The day of talks was concluded by Visa Ruokolainen, also from JYU, who spoke about the exciting development of super-resolution expansion microscopy at JYU.
Day 2 commenced with talks from Nicola Fletcher and Chris Evans from UCD on their work on the Hepatitis E virus, using SXT and other techniques to help understand cross-species transmission. Next Venera Weinhardt UHEI spoke about cultivating and imaging virus-infected cells in glass capillaries as well as progress in deep learning-based image segmentation approaches. Victoria Castro CSIC spoke about antiviral treatment experiments for Hepatitis C infection and imaging of HCV replicon cells with SXT and other technologies. Giulia Mizzon UKHD described SARS-COV2 and Dengue virus infection characterization via SXT as well as the development of correlative CLEXM workflows. Finally, Simon Leclerc JYU presented SXT images of Herpesvirus infected samples from their different SXT microscopes; the lab-based SXT100, and synchrotrons ALBA and NCXT Berkeley.
A big thank you to Maija Vihinen-Ranta and her team at JYU for organizing this fantastic meeting in the wonderful snow-covered Finnish Lapland and to all consortium members for their continued hard work and dedication to this exciting project!