Lucy Collinson: Imaging life across scales with light, X-rays, electrons and ions

Imaging technology for the biosciences has taken huge leaps forward in recent times. Nobel prizes have been awarded for breaking the resolution barrier in light microscopy and cryo electron microscopy, revealing the cellular dynamics and atomic structure of molecules. In parallel, X-ray and chemical imaging are migrating from the physical to the life sciences, revealing the internal structure of tissues and metabolic pathways in exquisite detail. And in volume electron microscopy, a plethora of new microscopes are revealing the complexity of cells and tissues in three dimensions with nanometre resolution, thereby unravelling neuronal connections in the brain and the subcellular hiding places of pathogens. But the fundamental trade-off between sample size and resolution remains - the larger the sample, the lower the resolution will be. The solution is correlative multimodal imaging, where the same sample is imaged intact at low resolution, and then gradually trimmed to smaller sizes for imaging at higher resolution in different types of microscope. The trick is to retain and follow the structure of interest at each step, with optimal sample preparation for each microscope, using probes that are visible in different microscopes and software to overlay different image types. This is ‘non-trivial’! In my talk, I will reveal how we approach this problem of finding and imaging the ‘needle in the haystack’, and how the general public are helping us train machines to analyse the resulting massive image data.

This is an event in the SSOM spotlight series.

Bio

Lucy Collinson is a specialist in advanced biological imaging, particularly electron microscopy and correlative imaging. At the Francis Crick Institute, she leads the Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform, collaborating with researchers to visualize structures ranging from cells to whole tissues and organisms.

Her work spans volume EM, cryo-microscopy, X-ray microscopy, image analysis, and the democratisation of advanced imaging technologies. She is especially interested in developing new imaging approaches when existing tools cannot answer challenging biological questions.

Lucy is also involved in collaborative projects such as “Etch a Cell,” which combines citizen science and AI to improve the analysis of large microscopy datasets. Her research connects biology, engineering, and computation, supporting studies in cancer, neuroscience, infection, and cell biology.