Gerd Leitinger
Starting out with a small license and being the only user, Dr. Gerd Leitinger now calls himself a "heavy user" of the Huygens software, and inspires a growing number of colleagues to start using Huygens for their own research. He says: "With the Huygens software the image quality has been improved and therefore the images tell me more." He is currently researching the molecular constituents of insect synapses, at the Institute for Cell biology, Histology and Embryology, at the Medical University of Graz, Austria (http://www.meduni-graz.at/3432?newsId=11012). One of the novelties of this project is the combination of light and electron microscopy. With the use of fluorescent markers, Dr. Gerd Leitinger stains molecules and localizes proteins in the neuronal system of insects with a confocal laser scanning microscope. Using Huygens software to optimize the resolving power of the microscope, he screens his samples for candidates of proteins located at the synapse, after which he performs electron microscopic immuno-cytochemical experiments to localize these proteins at a better resolution. He is pleased with the service and support that SVI offers: "When I had some problems with the images, I sent them to SVI support and they helped me very well."
Fig 1: Visual system of a locust: Blue is taurine staining, red is bruchpilot staining. The blue lines are photoreceptor cells, the red spots are contact sites. Left is before, right is after deconvolution
