A scientist, an engineer and a health researcher walk into a lab.
At McMaster University’s Centre for Advanced Light Microscopy (CALM), that’s not the beginning of a joke. It’s an ordinary day.
Located in the Arthur Bourns Building, CALM is a shared research facility serving the faculties of Health Sciences, Science and Engineering. Researchers with vastly different questions are connected not only by the technology they use, but by the expertise, training and support that help transform images into data, and data into discoveries.
Co-directors Ray Truant, Kyla Sask and Jose Moran-Mirabal embody the facility’s uniquely interdisciplinary nature. Their research interests span neurodegenerative disease, biomaterials engineering and micro- and nanostructured materials, but they share a common belief, that breakthrough discoveries happen when researchers have access to the right expertise, technology and collaborators.
Together, they lead a facility that supports researchers across disciplines, transforming complex scientific questions into meaningful data and discovery. We spoke with the trio about the questions driving their research and how CALM helps them uncover answers that would otherwise be out of reach.
The health researcher using light to understand Huntington’s disease
Ray Truant is one of the world’s leading Huntington’s disease researchers. His lab studies what goes wrong inside cells and how those changes lead to neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s disease and related disorders. Much of his work focuses on understanding how proteins move within cells, interact with DNA and participate in repair processes that keep cells healthy.
Truant’s research often requires observing proteins and cellular processes at extremely high resolution in living cells. CALM’s microscopy systems allow his team to track where disease-related proteins are located, how they move and how they interact with other cellular structures.
What is the big question driving your research, and why does it matter?
Neurodegeneration is an expensive, tragic, increasing problem in society with no real advances or treatments yet. As such, some very basic questions need to be asked at the cellular level about why these diseases take a lifetime to appear, and today we can do very sophisticated biochemistry inside a living cell using the biophysics of light.
How has access to CALM helped you answer research questions that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to answer?
By watching other labs conduct single molecule protein imaging by atomic force microscopy, we were inspired to try it and we could not only see the huntingtin protein in Huntington’s disease bind directly to DNA, but also learned how huntingtin is involved in DNA repair as the protein holds two broken strands of DNA together.
What do you think is the biggest value of having a shared facility that brings together researchers from Health Sciences, Science and Engineering?
Cross-disciplinary interactions allow investigators to approach problems and design experiments that are novel because they are coming from the perspective of different disciplines. What was once thought impossible to do, is possible when inputs come from materials scientists, engineers and biomedical experts. We can now do imaging experiments where if the device does not exist to do them, we can make the device.
The scientist using tiny, engineered materials to answer big, biological questions
Jose Moran-Mirabal is a chemist, materials scientist, and the founding scientific director of CALM. His lab creates and studies materials at extremely small scales and develops technologies that mimic biological environments.
Microscopy is central to nearly everything Moran-Mirabal’s group does. His team uses advanced imaging to understand how cells interact with engineered materials and to validate whether newly developed materials are behaving as intended
What is the big question driving your research, and why does it matter?
We are focused on understanding the interaction of cells with their immediate microenvironment and how they respond to changes in physical (e.g., structure, stiffness) and biochemical (e.g., protein composition) cues.
Recently, we have leveraged materials design and 3D bioprinting to create structures that mimic healthy and diseased tissue, which allows us to look at how cells behave in these microenvironments. This type of tissue biomimetics have important applications for drug research and development, where they can replace animal models, and in tissue repair and regenerative medicine, where they can serve as implantable devices that help the body heal itself.
How has access to CALM helped you answer research questions that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to answer?
Access to CALM has been fundamental to be able to probe cells as they interact with 3D bioprinted materials. Advanced light microscopy techniques allow us to image living cells within these tissue biomimetics with spatial and temporal resolutions that are not accessible with other techniques. Images obtained within CALM are not only beautiful visual representations of cells, but also contain information that allow us to quantify their response to the different microenvironments.
For example, we can accurately quantify how changing the stiffness of a 3D bioprinted structure impacts the ability of cells to proliferate and express markers that are representative of fibrotic lung disease.
What do you think is the biggest value of having a shared facility that brings together researchers from Health Sciences, Science and Engineering?
One of the guiding visions when we founded CALM was to make it a hub that catalyzes cross-disciplinary research. The biggest value of having a shared facility that brings together researchers of Science, Engineering and Health Sciences is the cross-pollination of ideas that leads to new collaborations and tackling of big questions by multidisciplinary teams.
The fact that five years in CALM has equal use from the three stakeholder faculties and serves over 100 research groups across campus and the GTA is a testament of the success in bringing in researchers from many different fields into a single hub and enabling their research.
The engineer designing safer and more effective medical devices
Kyla Sask is a biomaterials engineer whose research focuses on what happens when medical devices encounter the human body, particularly blood. Her work aims to make devices such as catheters, blood oxygenators, heart valves and other blood-contacting technologies safer and more effective.
Her team uses advanced microscopy and surface characterization tools to see how proteins, cells and biomaterials interact at microscopic scales. The facility helps uncover if proteins are attaching to a device surface, how cells are responding to new materials and if engineered surfaces are behaving as intended.
What is the big question driving your research, and why does it matter?
One of the big questions driving my research is: How can we prevent blood clots from forming on biomaterials used in medical devices? This is important because many of these devices fail (e.g. vascular grafts) or cause significant bleeding risks (e.g. external life support systems for infants), or have other long-term issues, that we aim to prevent.
How has access to CALM helped you answer research questions that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to answer?
Access to CALM and the various microscopes have helped us understand the micro- and nanoscale properties of our biomaterials, that we otherwise would have no way to visualize. For example, we have used the confocal and atomic force microscopes (AFMs) to compare the surface of the polymers we work with and how they change when we functionalize them.
What do you think is the biggest value of having a shared facility that brings together researchers from Health Sciences, Science and Engineering?
This shared facility brings value in so many ways. An essential component is the technical expertise that is available and enhanced by assisting with research questions from all three faculties. The shared equipment allows greater access for everyone and opportunities for new knowledge and collaborative projects.