David Sampson says some of WA’s top researchers are interested in UWA’s Nikon Centre for Excellence. Photo: Attila Csaszar

Macro outcomes from microscopes

Wednesday, 13 September, 2017 - 12:14

A collaborative project involving Japanese optical instrumentation company Nikon and the University of Western Australia has the potential to drive a new era of scientific research nationwide.

That’s the view of the UWA Centre for Microscopy’s characterisation and analysis director, David Sampson, who said the new Nikon Centre of Excellence (NCE) opened up a world of possibilities.

The new facility, which opened late last month, is located at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research. It houses six of the world’s most cutting-edge microscopy instruments, which can be used to see down to 10 nanometres (10,000 times the capability of the human eye) and is powerful enough to see atoms.

Professor Sampson said this degree of molecular insight would take science research to a new level.

“Being able to see molecules really allows us to access what’s going on; understanding life, understanding disease, understanding all sorts of things related to very, very small scales,” he said.

“We saw … this wonderful research on understanding exactly how the malaria parasite works.

“We can also do that with bacteria, we can do that with understanding the mechanisms within plant reproduction, within all sorts of different things within medicine.

“This includes many different diseases, such as Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.”

Professor Sampson said the new facility also had commercial implications, using the wine industry as an example.

“One of our researchers wants to use it to understand how grapes actually become dormant during the winter, how they actually wake up in the spring, how they begin to ripen; so of course that has major economic implications for the wine industry,” he said.

“It really is a tool that unlocks the door to seeing inside of living things.”

Professor Sampson said a number of WA’s top medical and biology researchers had expressed interest in accessing the facility.

He said the price options to use the facility varied, but ranged up to $3,000 annually to access all equipment, which would be paid to UWA.

However, university students across the state will be trained to use the equipment for free as a part of undergraduate curriculums.  

While Professor Sampson was reluctant to share the cost of the facility to UWA, he said it was worth several million dollars.

“Nikon has chosen the University of Western Australia because it sees it as one of the prestigious centres around the world, so yes, we have purchased the platform from Nikon but this is a partnership,” Professor Sampson said.

Nikon planning department manager for healthcare business unit, Takashi Kurokawa, said the strong existing relationship between Nikon and UWA was one factor behind the company’s decision to partner with the university.

He said the Perth-based Nikon Centre for Excellence was part of a broader strategy to enter into the Australian market, with the intention to establish more centres across the country.

Nikon marketing department section manager for healthcare business unit, Shuichi Iwabuchi, said the partnership also provided Nikon with marketing and product development benefits.

He said Nikon wanted to understand who would be using the microscopes and how they’d be using them, so the company could improve its products and better market them to customers.

According to Nikon’s website, its strategy involves allocating different specialisations for its centres across the globe; for example, Budapest NCE is a key neuroscience research centre, while Barcelona NCE specialises in stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) super-resolution microscopy.

The Perth NCE currently had no particular focus, Professor Sampson said.

“The key purpose of our facility is to actually make great research greater and to make new research possible, so we are really broad,” he said.

However, Messrs Kurokawa and Iwabushi said Nikon had plans for Perth’s NCE to develop a speciality, and it was a matter Nikon would discuss with UWA.