Gert van Cappellen
Dr. Gert van Cappellen has been working for the Erasmus Medical Center (Erasmus MC; http://www.erasmusmc.nl/
) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, since 1983. Next to providing computer support and researching apoptosis and follicle development (thesis 1998), Dr. van Cappellen started developing confocal and other forms of advanced microscopy within the Erasmus MC in 1996. He initiated, and currently presides the Optical Imaging Center (OIC) at the Erasmus MC. He teaches monthly courses on Laser Scanning Microscopy and a yearly international course on 'In Vivo Imaging'. His research focuses on cell processes: from DNA repair to protein turnover on microtubule plus ends and chromosome pairing during meiosis. He has been using the Huygens software since 2000. He uses it, for example, to track DNA repair spots within a cell, to determine their position using first deconvolution, followed by colocalization. He says: "The images we make are pretty noisy, and with Huygens we take out the noise. Furthermore, there are people who look at tiny objects, and there you are actually looking at the point spread function of the microscope. With Huygens we refine these images and therefore are able to define the objects better, determine better how they really look, because the microscope gives distortion". His ambition is to image live cells and to apply deconvolution and measure the position of object in the cell in real time.
| (a) | (b) | (c) |
Fig 1: (a) Raw confocal image of a Muntjac cell (deer with only 6 chromosomes), one single slice (b) Same slice after deconvolution (c) Huygens mip rendering of complete stack
Fig 2: Synaptonemal complex-3 (SYCP3) mCherry during meiosis of a transgenic mouse . Spermatocyte imaged with a 4Pi microscope and rendered with Huygens software. As seen from the 3 dividing SYCP3-axis this cells is in the early diplotene stage of meiosis.