” The challenge in understanding the complex spatial systems of entire organs and tumours will only be met by designing new multimodal and correlative workflows that daisy-chain microscopies together to capture images of nanoscale biological processes across scales within a single organism”- By Lucy Collinson, Director of EM-STP at the Francis Crick Institute.

In her article, Lucy Collinson discusses the merits of using X-ray, Electron, and Fluorescence microscopy for imaging cell and tissue structure. Whereas many microscopists see these imaging modalities as competing with each other, Lucy makes an extremely important observation that “to separate light, electron and X-ray microscopes and their respective communities, and to pitch them against each other in a ‘battle of the imaging modalities’ is to miss the point. The future of bioimaging is in the crosstalk between modalities”. She elaborates that the challenges in understanding the complex spatial systems of entire organs and tumours “will only be met by designing new multimodal and correlative workflows that daisy-chain microscopies together to capture images of nanoscale biological processes across scales within a single organism”.

SiriusXT is committed to working on these same challenges in its development of a lab-scale soft x-ray microscope and in demonstrating the synergies of correlating this imaging modality with both Electron and Fluorescence microscopies. This is also a key goal of the EU H2020-funded CoCID project where SiriusXT is collaborating with microscopists and virologists to demonstrate these synergies on a range of viruses.