State-of-the-Science Microscope Gives Kellogg Researchers New Edge

National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded investigators in the Kellogg Eye Center Vision Research Core and the Michigan Diabetes Research Center (MDRC) now have access to the latest advancements in confocal microscopy, thanks to an acquisition made possible by a NIH Shared Instrument (S10) grant.

The Leica Stellaris 8 was installed in the imaging facility in the Brehm tower shared by Kellogg and the MDRC in June 2021. It is one of only a handful of microscopes of its caliber found anywhere in the region.

The S10 grant is designed to enhance the work of NIH funded scientists by helping to fund instruments that are too costly for an individual investigator. An institution must demonstrate that the equipment will meet the needs at least three NIH-funded principal investigators who will share it.

“Our grant detailed how this microscope will advance the work of more than 30 investigators in ophthalmology and diabetes, with 15 primary investigators occupying the majority of its operational time,” says Stephen Lentz, Ph.D., Imaging Laboratory Director of the MDRC Morphology and Image Analysis Core.

Stephen Lentz, Ph.D.

David Antonetti, Ph.D., the principal investigator on the S10 grant, partnered with Dr. Lentz to catalog the specific needs of a wide range of researchers, and to detail the institutional support that U-M will provide.

“The integrated software of the Stellaris 8 offers significant improvements over imaging systems previously available,” says Dr. Antonetti. “For Kellogg investigators, it opens new windows into diseases like diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration and glaucoma.”

For example, multiple images can be rapidly acquired and “tiled” together into a composite image, making it possible to capture changes over an entire tissue segment or organ structure.

“By imaging the whole retina, we can analyze global vascular changes across a large swath of retinal cells,” Dr. Antonetti explains (see photo, right).

This new tool makes it possible to think about our work in new ways, and answer questions we couldn’t even ask before,” says Dr. Lentz. “It is already moving our research in new directions.”