A Moore Foundation-supported joint project between Omaya Dudin (University of Geneva) and Gautam Dey (EMBL Heidelberg) aims to uncover the cytoskeletal diversity of microbial eukaryotes – with the help of the protist community including tight collaborations with Thomas Richards (University of Oxford) and multiple European culture collections. Central to this project will be the use of expansion microscopy, a method that physically enlarges the samples (up to 4 times) and at the same time improves accessibility of antibodies and dyes. The generated imaging data will be integrated with transcriptomic and genomic analyses to ultimately build a morphological atlas of microbial eukaryotes. Importantly, the imaging data will be made openly accessible in real-time.
Read the University of Geneva press release about the funding of the project by the Moore Foundation.
For this approach, the team behind the project wants to involve the research community to help select target organisms, asking community members for suggestions and contributions. At the same time, the team will offer workshops for interested researchers who want to explore their own organisms with this (cost-effective) method, and they also offer to perform preliminary expansion tests on taxa of interest upon request.
Submit your request to the team.
The team behind this project and their collaborators have already applied expansion microscopy to over 200 aquatic microbial taxa by accessing two large European culture collections. The results of this work, showcasing the applicability of this method to eukaryotes across the tree, can be found in the preprint article “Charting the landscape of cytoskeletal diversity in microbial eukaryotes” on biorxiv.
Figure 6F. Expansion microscopy of ciliates collected from the environment. The internal structure of tubulin bundles within the feeding apparatus of Lacrymaria sp. NHS-ester (grey), tubulin (magenta), centrin (yellow), DNA (blue). Scale bars, 5 μm, adjusted for the expansion factor (from the preprint Charting the landscape of cytoskeletal diversity in microbial eukaryotes on biorxiv).
