Cyttron: A window on the molecular machinery of life

The Cyttron consortium focuses on bio-imaging techniques and includes a co-operation between the Universities of Leiden, Delft, Utrecht, Antwerp and London; the Leiden University Medical Medical Centre and the Companies of Bruker-Nonius BV, FEI BV, and Key Drug Prototyping BV under the leadership of Professor J.P. Abrahams.

The Cyttron consortium wants to implement a comprehensive, integrated infrastructure for bio-imaging and modeling cells down to atomic detail. We would like to provide a generic tool for identifying the molecular causes of disease, essential for the prevention of disease and the development of new drug and therapies, and to establish a platform for advanced diagnosis and tuning of individualized therapy, increasing effectiveness in health care. The consortium is highly multidisciplinary including (bio-)physicists, chemists, mathematicians, bio-informatics and image processing specialists, cell biologists, microscopists and medical researches from various research institutes.

Ranges in which various microscopic, spectroscopic and diffraction techniques are used in the visualization of the molecular components of life. The effective range is between its maximum resolution and the largest object that it can image.

Examples of biological objects at the corresponding size- and resolution ranges. From left to right; a small protein at atomic resolution, a virus at molecular resolution, the ultrastructure of a cell at nanoscopic resolution (from Baumeister, Science 2002) and the localization in the cell of a tagged protein at microscopic resolution. The aim of Cyttron is to integrate these modes of bio- imaging.