Feature: Life up close

By Tim Dean
Friday, 10 June, 2011

When Cynthia Whitchurch and Lynne Turnbull first gazed at the output of their shiny new $1.5 million DeltaVision|OMX microscope, they were astounded, to say the least. “I was blown away,” says Whitchurch, who is an associate professor at the new ithree institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). “What I saw was beyond my expectations.”

Just to be sure that the hefty investment was well placed, the duo ran a few head-to-head comparisons between the OMX and one of their conventional microscopes. The difference was stark. “It was like someone got the Windex out and cleaned the glass window you were looking through,” says Turnbull, who works with Whitchurch at ithree, and operates the OMX microscope.

“What had previously been a fuzzy green ball and a fuzzy red ball somewhere near each other we could see a was actually a green doughnut and red doughnut sitting one on top of each other. We were able to get much more clarity about the structure of what we were looking at and the physical distances that these things may or may not have been away from each other, which just wasn’t possible before.”

The reason for the unprecedented clarity and detail of these images is that the OMX is no ordinary microscope. It’s one of the new breed that are able to ‘break the light barrier’ and reveal details smaller than previously possible with conventional microscopes.

The OMX is a physics-defying super-resolution microscope, the only one of its kind in Australia, and one of only a handful worldwide. And it’s already been responsible for some groundbreaking research, with more just around the corner.

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Expectations

One of the reasons Whitchurch came to UTS in 2008 from Monash University was that the UTS was supportive of her desire to build a microscopy facility that would specifically address the needs of the microbiology community.

“I’ve had a lot of experience with microscopy in my research in the past, but it’s always been a challenge to do it. So I was quite keen to come here and set up something that was a bit more relevant to what we wanted to do.”

After joining UTS she worked to establish of the Microbial Imaging Facility, where she’s Director. While setting up the facility, she started thinking about acquiring some new equipment to get things up and running.

She put in a grant application with the Australia Research Council, specifically with high level deconvolution imaging in mind. However, while the grant application was still chugging through the ARC bureaucracy, a development took place that entirely changed the direction of Whitchurch’s vision.

The seeds of the development dated back a couple of years to when Whitchurch and Turnbull were still at Monash. They were treated to a talk by Professor John Sedat, from the University of California, San Francisco, who had just invented a most remarkable piece of technology: a microscope that can reveal objects with twice the resolution of conventional microscopes.

“At that stage we realised that technology would be fantastic for imaging microorganisms, but we had no clue then it was going to be commercially available,” says Whitchurch. And lo, only a couple of years later, while the ARC grant was still being processed, Sedat’s OMX microscope went on sale, having been developed into a commercial product by American company, Applied Precision.

“The Applied Precision people were touring the world trying to identify sites where they wanted to locate their first machines,” says Whitchurch. “We were put in touch with the Applied Precision people, and convinced them that we would have a fantastic application for their machine. It was actually something they’d never contemplated, so they got excited, and we got excited.”

Once the ARC grant came through, Whitchurch still had to do some wrangling to drum up enough funding to purchase the pricey DeltaVision|OMX microscope. Thankfully, Whitchurch was able to convince UTS of the tremendous potential of the system, and the university agreed to pony up the $1 million on top of the ARC grant needed to seal the deal.

It was once the OMX was installed that Whitchurch and Turnbull ran their head-to-head comparisons to make sure the money was well spent. “We wanted to see whether we’d got $1.5 million of kit that actually did something more than what we could do with a normal microscope,” says Turnbull.

And it did. “Not only was it incredibly exciting but it was a huge relief that it’s held up to our expectations. It’s gone beyond our expectations actually,” says Whitchurch.

Even Sedat agrees. He visited UTS in March last year to see the DeltaVision|OMX in action and was “pleasantly surprised” that the installation of the commercial version of his invention was able to produce images of a similar clarity to his own.

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