BioImagingUK Community Network

自近400年前首次使用以来，显微镜已发展成为世界各地生命科学家最强大和常用的研究工具之一。利用显微镜对生物样本成像可以提供丰富的信息，从了解组织在发育过程中是如何组织的，以及这种组织在疾病中是如何变化的，到研究单个蛋白质或DNA在活细胞内的行为。研究人员在实验室中使用的显微镜类型通常是非常先进和复杂的，可能需要专家团队来建造和维护它们，并教其他科学家如何在实验中使用它们。此外，分析研究小组从这类显微镜中获得的数据可能会很复杂。英国几乎所有的大学和研究机构都在他们的研究实验室中使用显微镜，但我们目前缺乏让这些来自不同领域的科学家分享他们的成像设备、专业知识和想法的好方法。这种互动对于知识交流、培训研究人员和开发新想法非常重要，这些新想法最终将提高我们的研究水平，这意味着英国处于这一令人兴奋的技术领域的前沿。这项提案的目的是支持一个名为BioImagingUK的全英国网络，它将为成像科学家提供一种互动的方式，讨论新出现的想法，并决定我们需要努力提高研究质量的关键优先事项。BioImagingUK的一大重点还将是支持技术和更初级的成像科学家，并采取重要措施帮助他们的职业发展和在英国研究界的知名度。这不仅对他们的职业生涯很重要，而且也有助于英国留住杰出人才，确保我们在这个具有国际竞争力的科学领域保持领先地位。BioImagingUK还将帮助学术研究人员与相关行业（如制造显微镜的公司）的团队进行更密切的互动，以帮助在两个部门之间建立更好的关系，并确定共同开发新技术的新方法。最后，这个社区网络还将为来自英国各地的生物成像科学家提供一个重要的平台，以便与公众交流他们的研究。

Since it's first use nearly 400 years ago, microscopy has grown to be one of the most powerful and commonly used research tools by life scientists across the world. Using microscopes to image biological samples can provide a wealth of information ranging from understanding how tissues are organised during development and how this changes in diseases, to studying single proteins or DNA behave inside living cells. The types of microscopes that researchers use in the lab are often very advanced and complex in nature, and can require teams of experts to build and maintain them as well as to teach other scientists how to use them for their experiments. Moreover, analysing the data that research teams produce from these sorts of microscopes can be complicated. Nearly all Universities and research Institutes across the UK have microscopes in use within their research labs, but we currently lack good ways for these scientists from very different fields to share their imaging equipment, expertise and ideas. This sort of interaction is very important for knowledge exchange, training researchers and developing new ideas that will ultimately improve our research and mean the UK is at the forefront of this exciting technological area. The purpose of this proposal is to support up a UK-wide network called BioImagingUK, which will provide a way for imaging scientists to interact, discuss newly emerging ideas and decide on key priorities that we need to work on to improve the quality of our research. A big focus of BioImagingUK will also be in supporting the technical and more junior imaging scientists and put in place important measures to help their career development and visibility across the UK research community. This is not only important for their careers, but also really helps the UK to retain exceptional talent to ensure we remain at the forefront of this internationally competitive scientific area. BioImagingUK will also help academic researchers to interact more closely with teams from associated Industries (such as companies who manufacture microscopes) to help build better relationships between the two sectors and identify new ways to develop novel technology together. Finally, this community network will also provide an important platform for bio-imaging scientists from across the UK to communicate their research to the public.