Biosciences Research Seminar: Correlative Light Electron Microscopy (CLEM) strategies for life sciences

The talk will focus on the following: A wide variety of Microscopy techniques is underpinning key discoveries in Biomedical research. For instance, Live light microscopy can show us the dynamics of a system. On the other hand Electron Microscopy (EM) gives us better resolution combined with a structural reference space.
Correlative Light Electron Microscopy (CLEM) combines the strengths of light and electron microscopy in one experiment and the sum of such an experiment should provide more data / insight than each technique alone (hence 1 + 1 = 3). There are many ways to perform a CLEM experiment and a variety of microscopy modalities can be combined (see e.g. Brown et al., 2012, Olmos et al., 2015). The choice of these instruments and the experimental approach should primarily depend on the scientific question to be answered. Any CLEM experiment can usually be divided in 3 parts; probes, processing, and analysis.
The application of CLEM technology is not limited to pure cellular based systems. One of the aims of Synthetic Biology is to mimic and improve existing biological systems for instance for the delivery of drugs and building scaffolds in and around cells (Lee et al., 2018).
I will discuss a number of CLEM workflows based on light microscopy in conjunction with Transmission Electron Microscopy, each with its specific application and its advantages and challenges. It worth noting that it should be the biological question that drives the technology, sometimes a fairly simple approach suffices to answer the question. In other cases however it requires the development of new tools and instruments to adequately do so. In my presentation I will highlight this approach through a number of examples.