NEWS

Federal grant enables biologists to buy state-of-the-art confocal microscope

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- A new $275,000 federal grant will enable scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to buy and install a state-of-the-art Zeiss confocal microscope that will help them unlock some of the deepest secrets of the human heart. And the lungs, bones, brain and any number of other tissues in people and just about all other animals or plants one can name.

Eventually attached to a powerful computer on the fourth floor of the biology department’s Wilson Hall, the device will include four lasers that can simultaneously light up individual molecules in four different colors, said Dr. Mark Peifer, associate professor of biology at UNC. He and colleagues will share the Zeiss LSM 510 confocal laser scanning microscope with biomedical scientists at the UNC School of Medicine.

The grant comes from the National Institutes of Health and is being supplemented with more than $100,000 from the university from sources including overhead receipts generated by research and state funds. The Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Research, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Program in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology are helping with the effort as part of a campuswide $245 million genome sciences initiative. The biology department also is contributing toward installing and operating the microscope.

"This remarkable piece of equipment will allow us to see and take pictures of single molecules in living tissue by adding fluorescent labels to the molecules," Peifer said. "You can actually see the protein machinery that makes the cells work at incredibly high resolution. New technology allows us to tag the protein machines themselves directly. This is very exciting for many reasons."

For example, he and colleagues can mark DNA with a fluorescent label and watch the DNA condense into chromosomes and then segregate into two daughter cells, he said. They can then examine what protein machinery is normally needed for correct chromosome segregation and how alterations in the machinery contribute to errors that occur in diseases like cancer.

"Professor Bob Duronio has already created a stir among students in his Biology 50 class by showing them chromosomes in motion in a living fruit fly embryo," Peifer said. "Bob made beautiful movies of mitosis taking place in real animals in real time while we were testing the new microscope."

Information gleaned from basic science studies will be applied to determining what happens during aging and such disease processes as heart disease and Alzheimer’s, a severe and progressive form of senility.

Dr. Tony D. Perdue of the biology department will direct the new microscope facility, which is expected to be completed by November, said Peifer, also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Among researchers taking advantage of the equipment for research and teaching will be geneticists, physiologists and cell biologists, he said. For example, Dr. Edward D. Salmon, professor of biology at UNC and one of the world’s leading microscopists, will be among the users.

The new microscope can clearly show objects as small as 1/10,000^th of an inch in diameter, Peifer said. Since it can show as many as four different molecules simultaneously, it will significantly boost the UNC faculty research capabilities now limited in some cases by older microscopes.

The NIH’s National Center for Research Resources provided the funding to UNC as part of a program to support purchases of major equipment that top university scientists around the country otherwise could not afford.

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Note: Peifer can be reached at (919) 962-2271. He can supply images created with the microscope. Information about the manufacturer, Carl Zeiss Inc., is available at http://www.zeiss.com/us/