The Opera Phenix Microscope for High Content Screening Applications

克里克是医学研究理事会、英国癌症研究中心、威康信托基金会和三所领先大学的合作伙伴关系：伦敦大学学院（伦敦）、伦敦帝国理工学院（伦敦）和伦敦国王学院（伦敦）。克里克立志成为世界领先的医学研究机构之一。克里克通过集中的设施和功能（称为科学运营）实现了运营和研究效率以及规模经济，为克里克的所有研究人员提供了先进的设备，用于研究和实验室功能的动物，如高通量筛选设施（HTS）技术进步意味着，现在能够确定基因何时作为衰老或疾病过程的一部分而改变或丢失已是司空见惯的事。这种损失对任何单个细胞的影响以及它如何导致疾病还不太明显。事实上，对于任何基因在任何特定细胞或条件下的功能作用，或者任何基因通常如何影响细胞的行为或反应方式，仍然缺乏了解。幸运的是，我们现在有了试剂（称为CRISPR），可以让研究人员对任何感兴趣的基因进行测序，并评估其损失对细胞行为的影响。基因丢失对细胞的影响是从细胞正常生长和运动时或受到刺激时拍摄的图像的定量分析中推断出来的。通过测量缺乏单个基因的细胞的特性，研究人员可以推断出它在整个细胞中可能发挥的作用。克里克的HTS设施已经创建了一个系统，使研究人员能够同时研究数百到数千个基因的基因丢失对细胞行为的影响，实验称为筛选。该建议是一种能够自动成像和分析此类实验所需的数万个样本的显微镜。这种新的显微镜与CRISPR试剂相结合，使我们有机会阐明基因如何控制细胞的基本机制，以及它们在重要的人类疾病中可能发挥的作用。

The Crick is a partnership between the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and three leading universities: UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King's College London. The Crick aspires to be one of the world's leading medical research institutes. The Crick achieves operational and research efficiencies and economies-of-scale through centralised facilities and functions, known as Science Operations, that provide all researchers at the Crick, irrespective of affiliation, with access to cutting-edge equipment, animals for research and laboratory enabling functions such as the High Throughput Screening facility (HTS).Technical advances mean that it is now commonplace to be able to identify when genes have been altered or lost as part of ageing or a disease process. It is less obvious what effect this loss has on any individual cell and how it contributes to a disease. Indeed, understanding the functional roles for any gene in any particular cell or condition or how any gene normally contributes to the way a cell behaves or responds is still somewhat lacking. Fortunately, we now have reagents (called CRISPRs) that allow researchers to inactivate any gene of interest and assess the consequences of its loss on cell behaviour. The effect of gene loss on the cell is inferred from quantitative analysis of images taken of the cells when they are either growing and moving normally or when they have been challenged to respond to a stimulus. By measuring the properties of cells lacking a single gene, researchers can infer something about the role it might be playing in the cell as a whole. The HTS facility at the Crick has created a system that allows researchers to study the effect of gene loss on cell behaviour for hundreds to thousands of genes simultaneously, experiments referred to as screening.This proposal is for a microscope capable of automatically imaging and analysing the tens of thousands of samples that such experiments demand. This new microscope in conjunction with the CRISPR reagents gives us the opportunity to shed light on both the basic mechanisms of how genes control what cells do and potentially the role they play in important human diseases.