HORMEL INSTITUTE

Right tool for the right job

The Hormel Institute adds powerful new microscope in the continuing battle against cancer

By The hormel InsTITuTe

Just like any industry or profession, having the right tools gets the job done better and faster. Such is the case with the “cancer fighting tools” provided to researchers at The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota.

Thanks to support from The Hormel Foundation and University of Minnesota’s Office of the Vice President for Research office, The Hormel Institute added an exciting new instrument to accelerate research: A Zeiss LSM 900 confocal microscope with 3 high sensitivity GaAsP detectors and an Airyscan super resolution detector. The 600-pound instrument was shipped from Germany, arriving in four wooden crates holding the precious discovery-accelerating equipment.

“This type of microscope allows scientists to image very small or weakly fluorescent objects with the resolution to distinguish between small objects very close together,” said Todd Schuster, manager of the Instrument Core Facility at The Hormel Institute UMN. Schuster joined The Hormel Institute in 2004 and operates, maintains and oversees a diverse array of scientific instruments and equipment to ensure their safe and proper use.

“It improves on a regular microscope by using a system of pinholes to remove light resulting in sharper, higher quality images. It helps researchers show co-localization (events happening in the same cell) to get a sharper image of very small objects.”

The new confocal microscope replaces an older, outof-date model and will be housed in the Shared Instrument Core Facility, part of the International Center for Research Technology (ICRT). The Shared Instrument Core is an area where any researcher can go to use instruments needed for research. The confocal microscope will be available to all researchers after they complete training sessions interspersed with many hours of using the microscope to become adept at acquiring desired images.

The ICRT houses some of the world’s most important technologies used to further cancer research discoveries. In addition to the new confocal microscope, the ICRT includes the CryoEM lab, mass spectrometer, flow cytometers, and over 50 different instruments. The ICRT was developed in 2008 with an IBM supercomputer.

COVID-19 brought new normals to The Hormel Institute like it did for all organizations - no large meetings or conferences yet, social distancing maintained in the work place, the wearing of personal protective equipment and a “sun rise plan” for returning to work in labs or on site.

For Todd Schuster, maintaining safety in the Shared Instrument Core is achieved by limiting the number of people that can be in a room at a time, providing gloves and masks for each researcher and disinfecting after each use.

Several scientists have research projects lined up, excited to use the new confocal microscope and a few of these are highlighted below:

Dr. Luke Hoeppner – Cancer Biology

“Lung cancer is the leading cancer related cause of death in the U.S. and worldwide. Unfortunately, many individuals are diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer, and frequently therapies become ineffective within one year.

Developing resistance to lung cancer therapy is a major problem. To combat this problem, discoveries are needed to learn how to better kill cancer cells and prevent them from evading the effects of therapy. Our research group will use the new confocal microscope to test how lung cancer cells might become resistant to therapy. Such basic science advances have the potential to serve as a foundation for the development of new strategies to fight the deadliest of cancers.”

Dr. Sergio Gradilone – Cancer Cell Biology & Translational Research

“Primary cilia, from the Latin word ‘eyelashes’, are cellular organelles that are present on almost all type of cells of the body. The cilium contains a microtubule scaffold which protrudes from the cell, and is ideally positioned to sense and interact with the cellular environment, compa-

Todd Schuster standing next to the boxes and crates containing the new confocal microscope at The Hormel Institute. Photo provided

rable to an ‘antenna’. Its function is to sense the extracellular environment through its abundance of receptors and linked signaling pathways. The importance of cilia becomes evident when there are defects in ciliary structures. These ciliary defects can lead to diseases that have been denominated ciliopathies.

In particular, many tumors lose primary cilia. It has been proposed that the primary cilium may work as a tumor suppressor organelle. Many cancer cells have developed mechanisms to inhibit ciliogenesis and stimulate ciliary disassembly. The loss of primary cilia is linked with increased proliferation. Therefore, efforts to stimulate restoration of cilia on tumor cells are underway. The ability to follow and photograph the formation of cilia, offered by the new confocal microscope, provides us a new tool to assess novel therapeutics to restore the expression of the cilium in malignant cells and decrease tumor growth.”

Dr. Rebecca Morris – Stem Cells & Cancer

The Morris laboratory studies tissue morphology and pathology to determine the role of bone marrow cells in skin cancer. Hence, we make major use of quantitative light microscopy and photomicrography. Confocal microscopy is a major tool for these studies due to its features of optical dissection and super resolution that increase our understanding of cellular interactions that cause skin cancer.

In addition to the Ariscan Super-resolution, the confocal’s ability to “tile” or to sew together multiple images into one larger image will enable us to increase our knowledge of the tissue microenvironment by facilitating seamless study of serial sections at all magnifications. The Morris lab is overjoyed to welcome this essential tool to our microscopy suite.