Miguel Vicente
Prof. Dr. Miguel Vicente is professor of research at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia CSIC in Madrid (http://www.cnb.uam.es/), supervising a research group of ten people. His group focuses on bacterial cell division, imaging the proteins which assemble in the middle of the cell and effect binary fission. Their goal is to describe the process of assembly of the division proteins, the stability of the protein ring and the interaction between the different components. His group started using Huygens in 2003. They like Huygens because of the improvement in the signal of the protein: the antibodies they use are fluorescently labeled and the images have a high background noise. They say: "Huygens is essential to discriminate between the background and the signal" . He has started exploring the use of electron tomography for cell imaging, but sees technical difficulties still. He believes there is still a lot of work to do at the interface between light and electron microscopy. Another important step into the future of imaging, is the advancement in the use of fluorophores, which are able to produce FRET signals in vivo.
Fig. 1: The distribution of the essential ZipA protein, one of the three components of the E. coli proto-ring, detected with a specific polyclonal antibody and a secondary antirabbit antibody conjugated with Alexa 594 as fluorophore. The cells have been induced to filament by depriving them of FtsZ (essential for division) and are shown in the process of recovery after returning to them the ability to synthetize it. Images, taken with a BX61 Olympus microscope and Olympus CCD DP70 camera, were deconvoluted using Huygens software.
