Pioneering Techniques Win NC3Rs Approval


Research into ALS has historically relied on the use of animal models, particularly mice, with around 250 papers a year reporting in vivo studies. While this research has been important for understanding disease biology, the models are often poorly characterised, do not recapitulate the sporadic form of the disease (which makes up 90% of cases) and the disease phenotype can differ between mice and humans.


Rickie’s team take a different approach, collecting skin samples from ALS patients and healthy controls and turning them into stem cells capable of becoming any cell type. Then using chemical cues, they guide the stem cells into becoming motor neurones, or supporting cells, that can be studied in a dish.


Rickie Patani


Crick scientist Rickie Patani has been awarded an international prize for pioneering stem-cell techniques that reduce the need for animals in motor neurone disease research.


Awarded by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refi nement & Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) and sponsored by GSK, it recognises Rickie’s use of patient-derived stem cells to better understand the disease and screen potential therapeutics without relying on animal models.


Motor neuron disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), affects around 5,000 adults a year in the UK and is characterised by a progressive degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord that ultimately leads to death. Around 10% of cases run in families.


This so-called ‘induced pluripotent stem cell’ (iPSC) approach has several scientifi c benefi ts over mouse models, including the ability to refl ect the genetic diversity of patients, investigate sporadic forms of the disease (which represent 90% of the cases) and allow early molecular events to be studied.


The robust iPSC differentiation protocols developed has already enabled three groups in the UK to shift some of their research from animal models.


Rickie said: “I’m honoured and grateful to receive this award for our efforts to develop human iPSCs of neurodegeneration. The lead fi rst author of this work was my fi rst ever PhD student, Dr Claire Hall, who helped to build on prior insights made during my own PhD and postdoctoral research. A decade after this work was started, I’m delighted to see that our models are now being widely adopted across several laboratories at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, the Francis Crick Institute and beyond.


Motor neurons grown from iPS cells in the lab, viewed down a microscope. Credit: Jasmine Harley


“I’d like to thank these colleagues for their confi dence in our iPSC models, research vision and for their shared commitment to the 3Rs. Crucially, this model will serve to reduce and in some cases replace, the use of animal models.


The overarching vision of my research group is to use these motor neuron and astrocyte models to identify and study the earliest molecular events that lead to ALS.”


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Botanical Microscopy 2019


Scientifi c Organising Committee: Chris Hawes, Beatrice Satiat- Jeunemaitre, Verena


Kriechbaumer, Katja Graumann, Louise Hughes, Imogen Sparkes.


The 11th running of the International Botanical Meeting, 14th -18th April, will in 2019 be held in the new lecture/conference facilities at Oxford Brookes University with accommodation in the famous Queen’s College, Oxford. As in recent meetings there will be 7 or 8 lead speakers and the rest of the programme will be chosen from offered talks. To attract postgraduate students to participate, a number of bursaries will be available alongside reduced registration fees. Topics will as ever be a mix of state-of-the art microscopy combined with the latest developments in plant cell biology, including organelle dynamics, nuclear structure and function, and autophagy. Planned associated activities will include a Zeiss/RMC


sponsored workshop on 3-D imaging technologies, a trip round the museum of the History of Science (the world’s fi rst public museum and home to the RMS microscope collection) and a tour of the famous Oxford Botanical Gardens. We welcome you all to the famous University City of Oxford.


Book now!


Please note, bursaries are available for early career researchers to attend this meeting. Visit www.rms.org


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Gary Markey and Terry Lee, mechanical technicians at Daresbury Laboratory, building the staves that are now on their way to ALICE at CERN. (Credit: STFC)


A team of scientists, engineers and technicians from Daresbury Laboratory, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool, have been playing a key role in developing and building ground-breaking new technologies that will enable a major upgrade of the ALICE experiment, one of the four main detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.


ALICE acts like a giant microscope that is used to observe and study a state of matter that was last present in the universe just billionths of a second after the Big Bang. The LHC is used to create this matter, by accelerating and then colliding heavy nuclei of lead.


Low Tech Build Supports Cutting Edge Microscopy


Researchers have come up with an inexpensive, automated way to image biological samples, using the children’s toy, LEGO.


Scientists at the Crick, UCL and Aix University in Marseille have described* a novel inexpensive device, built with LEGO parts, that can be adapted to most microscopes.


“Sometimes the best solutions to complex biological questions are remarkably low-tech,” said Ricardo Henriques, who runs a satellite lab at the Crick and led the project.


“By developing hardware that uses inexpensive LEGO components as its building blocks, we’ve built an accessible tool that delivers customisable cutting-edge microscopy at a fraction of the cost.”


The device, called NanoJ-Fluidics (and nicknamed Pumpy McPumpface), enables researchers to observe cells in a highly customisable format. For the very fi rst time, researchers can


observe samples of cells at well-defi ned moments in time, for example when they are dividing or become sick. After this initial round of observation, the LEGO device can manipulate the liquid environment of the cells in a completely automated manner, enabling subsequent imaging of the same cells at a much higher nanoscale resolution.


The LEGO hardware and accompanying software are fully open- source, enabling other researcher groups to make their own devices. Thanks to this open science approach, NanoJ-Fluidics has already been successfully adopted by over 10 labs across the world.


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Extremely thin and highly-pixelated sensors, together with ultra- light support structures will boost the tracking performance of ALICE by a factor of a hundred. It will be the thinnest, most pixelated tracker at the LHC, capable of identifying and measuring the energy of particles created by the LHC’s collisions at lower energies than any of the other LHC experiments.


The Daresbury-Liverpool team is building 30 staves of this new generation of sensor, each containing millions of pixels. The staves, which frame and support the sensors, are now being carefully transported to CERN in batches every six weeks until the end of September, where they will be tested before being installed, offi cially making ALICE a billion pixel detector


Dr Roy Lemmon, physicist and lead for the ALICE upgrade project at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory, which is located at Sci-Tech Daresbury, said: “This project highlights the skills and signifi cant role of the UK’s researchers in the development of new generations of technology for, in this case, ALICE, part of the world’s largest science experiment. It’s very exciting to be part of something that will not only help solve our science challenges, but which could also impact our lives in a really positive way. The ALICE upgrade is taking place during the scheduled two-year shutdown for the LHC. The newly-upgraded experiment will start taking data in 2021.”


ALICE Upgrading to Billion Pixel Detector


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