KGI Receives Funding from HEDCO Foundation for Confocal Microscope

CLAREMONT, Calif., Jan. 30, 2008 – Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) today announced that it received a grant of almost $300,000 from the HEDCO Foundation to purchase a confocal microscope that will help advance research in numerous investigations at KGI.

The confocal microscope will provide students, faculty and research staff with the ability to analyze three-dimensional characteristics of cell and tissue samples.

“Thanks to the HEDCO Foundation, KGI will have the necessary equipment to advance research in fields of bioscience and medicine including agricultural biotechnology, stem cell biology, cancer and cardiac health,” said Sheldon Schuster, Ph.D., KGI’s president. “The confocal microscope will support the kind of innovative, applied investigations that have become a hallmark of KGI’s research.”

Confocal microscopes offer several advantages over conventional optical microscopes, including shallow depth of field, elimination of out-of-focus glare and the ability to collect serial optical sections from thick specimens at the cellular level. In biomedical science, a major application of confocal microscopy involves imaging either fixed or living cells and tissues that have usually been labeled with one or more fluorescent probes.

For example, Dr. Ian Phillips, KGI’s Norris Professor of Applied Life Sciences, is working on new ways of treating damaged heart tissue with stem cells. The confocal microscope will allow Phillips to study the differentiation of stem cells, thanks to the equipment’s unique capability to scan the tissue or cell slice in the same layer. Conventional microscopes cannot avoid the overlap of cells in sectioned tissues which can result in false positive images leading to invalid experimental conclusions.

The confocal microscope will also be utilized by other KGI faculty exploring molecular communication inside cells (Dr. Animesh Ray), the embryogenesis of flowering plants with a focus on the role of steroid signaling networks (Dr. Kathrin Schrick) and the biogenesis and degradation of the organelle peroxisome which can contribute to a lethal set of diseases known as Zellweger syndrome.

KGI Background
Educating the future leaders of the bioscience industry, Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) offers an interdisciplinary graduate education through its Master of Bioscience (MBS) degree program and its Ph.D. program in Applied Life Sciences. Using team-based learning and real-world projects, KGI's innovative curriculum seamlessly combines applied life sciences, bioengineering, bioethics and business management. KGI also has a robust research program concentrating on the translation of basic discoveries in the life sciences into applications that can benefit society. KGI is a member of The Claremont Colleges, located in Claremont, California.