CBI staff have a wealth and breadth of knowledge in cell biological techniques and regularly utilise a range of both routine and cutting edge techniques. Staying at the forefront of current, relevant methodology is an important aspect of our work and in addition to personal research areas, we strive to optimise cell biological techniques and make them available across SCRI and to our collaborators. All staff are highly competent microscopists with specialisations in different areas.

The list below is not exhaustive, but gives a flavour of the competencies of the group.

• Light and fluorescence microscopy (including phase-contrast, differential interference contrast (Nomarski) imaging etc.).
• Confocal laser scanning microscopy (including FRAP, FRET and BiFC, fluorescence, transmission and reflection imaging).
• Transmission electron microscopy (including contrast imaging, histochemical staining and immuno-labelling techniques).
• Digital imaging (macro and micro; light and fluorescence).
• Image analysis (including quantification, 3-D rendering and deconvolution).
• Wide variety of fluorescent protein methods including photobleaching, photoactivation, photo-switching, fluorescence resonance-transfer (FRET) and bi-molecular fluorescence methodologies.
• Experienced with a wide selection of expressible fluorescent proteins including various GFPs, YFP, CFP, DsRed, mRFP, tdTomato, mPlum, mOrange, Kindling, Eos-FP, PA-GFP, PS-CFP.
• Wide selection of stably-expressed transgenic markers for compartments such as the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, microtubules, actin, plasmodesmata, nuclei etc.
• Transient expression systems including agrobacterium, micro-projectile bombardment and viral vectors.
• Phloem tracers, sink-source transition imaging, xylem tracers, symplastic tracers.
• Protein, metabolite, DNA and RNA imaging methods.
• Viral vector creation and optimization.
• Gene shuffling.
• cDNA library construction and transient expression in plants.
• High-throughput fluorescent library screening methods.