Heidelberg – Hamburg Infectious Diseases Imaging Association

Microscopy has been a corner stone technology for infectious disease research since the invention of the microscope almost 400 years ago. The ability to interrogate the spatial organization of a biological system and its dynamics enables us to investigate living systems under realistic near-physiological conditions, which makes microscopy unique among biomedical methods. In addition, in infectious disease research, one often deals with rare molecular events that can easily be missed as they become “averaged out” in bulk measurements when using classical biochemical, genetic and genomic population-based approaches. 

 

Microscopy-based approaches allow researchers to identify and focus their attention exactly on such rare key events, which often make the difference between the healthy and the diseased state. However, highly infectious and relevant pathogens, in particular emerging pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, typically fall into the risk group 3 and thus require laboratories of the biosafety level 3 (BSL3). Consequently, the microscopy infrastructure needs to be placed and operated in an BLS3 laboratory. The required biosafety measures impose practical limits, which necessitates the design of novel workflows to guarantee safe and simple sample handling, extensive user supervision and training, and complicates device maintenance. Nevertheless, the ability to observe unmodified pathogens in real time in physiologically relevant model systems makes BSL3 microscopy a unique tool to characterize pathogens in the infected host yielding results with higher translational potential and is thus worth the effort.