Hoon Lab Secures UW2020 Funding

The Hoon Research Laboratory, led by Mrinalini Hoon, PhD, assistant professor, has been awarded $500,000 by the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative Cohort for the project, “Imaging the Third Dimension at the Nanometer Resolution.”

The award will be used to acquire a 3View serial block face scanning electron microscope (SBFSEM) that will allow for large-scale 3D reconstructions of cellular structures and connectivity measures at the finest resolution. A summary of the project can be found here.

“We are very excited about bringing this technology as a shared campus facility. This instrument will allow ultra fine-scale 3D reconstructions of cellular ensembles and tissue structures and will definitely bolster biological research on campus not only in terms of electron microscopy tools but also in terms of the questions researchers can ask. For our Lab this means asking questions about how retinal nerve cells connect and communicate with one another in health and disease.” – Dr. Mrinalini Hoon

A 3D reconstruction of the primary arbors of a mouse retinal ganglion (output) cell using serial block face scanning electron microscopy. Serial images were aligned and the ganglion cell traced using the TrakEM module of ImageJ.

 

The UW2020 initiative is funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The UW2020 project aims to support groundbreaking research at UW-Madison.

To see the full list of Round 5 awards, head to https://research.wisc.edu/funding/uw2020/round-5-projects/