$6 Million NIH Grant Boosts MDI Bio Lab’s World-Class Microscopy Center

Press Release

$6 Million NIH Grant Boosts MDI Bio Lab's World-Class Microscopy Center

Bar Harbor campus to host national microscopy conference in 2025

Over the past several years, MDI Biological Laboratory has expanded its center for leading-edge microscopy, where innovative imaging technology and an open-access model are providing unique benefits to the scientific community.

The facility opened a new window on discovery this summer, when scientists outfitted a groundbreaking, laser-based 3D microscope with virtual reality features that allow users to magnify, view, measure and move around the molecular structures of whole organisms as if from the inside.

Now, a $6 million renewal of a grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) will increase researchers' access to the Light Microscopy Facility's full array of state-of-the-art magnification and image-processing infrastructure.

"We're not just keeping this incredible technology to ourselves," says Iain Drummond, Ph.D., Scientific Director of the Lab's Kathryn W. Davis Center for Regenerative Biology and Aging. "This award funds training, travel, and time with the equipment for scientists and students throughout northern New England. It's an effort to democratize science, to float all boats."

As a marker of its growing stature in the field, MDI Bio Lab in 2025 will become the new host of the prestigious, week-long Light Sheet and Fluorescence Microscopy Conference, formerly held at the University of Chicago's Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

The grant is part of an NIGMS initiative to build research capacity in smaller states, called "Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence" (COBRE). The new COBRE award will also:

• Augment the Lab's animal husbandry facilities to support unique models for human health such as axolotl (Mexican salamander), and fund internships for trainees recruited through the Hancock County Vocational Center and veterinary programs nationwide.
• Increase researchers' access to the Laboratory's Computational Genomics and Data Science facility while developing new programming to support a self-sustaining budget for the initiative, which facilitates cloud-based biomedical research.

For more information, contact:

Fred Bever
Chief Communications Officer

[email protected] / 207-318-9093

MDI Bio Lab is a non-profit research and training institute focused on the science of aging, regenerative medicine and environmental health

Sidebar image: Zebrafish brain imaged by Romain Madelaine, Ph.D., illuminating neuronal pathways associated with sight.

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