Kees Straatman
Dr. Kees Straatman is a Senior Experimental Officer at the Advanced Imaging Facilities of the College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology at the University of Leicester, UK (http://www.le.ac.uk/biochem/microscopy/ ). He is managing twelve different microscopes, as well as a FACSCanto II and a Typhoon Trio+ Imager together with a number of analysis systems. He studied in Wageningen at the Wageningen Agricultural University, NL, and also did his PhD in Wageningen where he researched the architecture of cellular nuclei. Moving to England, he first worked in Birmingham and moved after 3 years to Leicester, where he did research into telomeres in yeast. This involved a lot of confocal work and he made a name for himself as an imaging expert, with more and more people at the institute coming to him with imaging questions. This resulted finally in a position as SEO for advanced light microscopy. Now, over a 100 people make use of the facilities, from students to principal investigators, from the fields of medicine and biological sciences.. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate students and gives a workshop every year, which includes also a lecture and hands-on session by a member of the SVI team. About Huygens he says: "A group here was doing co-localization studies and thought partial co-localization was happening, but after deconvolution it turned out not to be case, so deconvolution was a big help there. Also in yeast cell projects the deconvolution is used a lot." He notices that it are mostly the same groups which use deconvolution and concludes that a large part of the data "probably never gets properly analyzed." The goal he sets for his facilities is to bring in as many different microscopic techniques into the facilities as needed for the research done at the university. In the last four years he has added eight microscope systems to the facilities. What he likes about Huygens Essential, which he has been using for ten years now, is that it is "easy to set up and use. We set up batch processing for yeast images overnight. Software problems we had in the past were always quickly resolved. It does what it should do, I tested other deconvolution packages in the past, but Huygens came out as the best one." In the future he will be looking into super-resolution and more live cell imaging, done with confocal microscopes. He is also in contact with other groups within the University of Leicester that are building their own microscopes, but in his current position, teaching and helping people with microscopy is most important: especially teaching them to think outside the box.
Fig 1: Pre- (left) and post-deconvolution (right)
