An Australian Advancement – Titan Krios G4 Microscope Launch

In May 2024, the Ramaciotti Centre for Cryo-Electron Microscopy went on to launch the Titan Krios G4 microscope, a state-of-the-art instrument that happens to be one of the most advanced microscopes from Australia.

It is well to be noted that microscopy happens to be a basic technique when it comes to biomedical research, and the record-breaking resolutions that the Titan Krios G4 brings will go on to enable the researchers to dig deeper into the molecular bodies as far as human bodies are concerned, thereby offering critical insights in terms of the prevention of diseases, their management, as well as cure.

Funded by Microscopy Australia as well as enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy- NCRIS, Monash Australia, along with the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund- VHESIF, the Titan Krios G4 happens to be an exceptional addition in terms of Australian national microscopy capacity.

The Titan Krios G4, which has been developed by Thermo Fisher Scientific, has gone on to achieve record breaking resolutions when it comes to biological imaging, and it is indeed going to be offering a prominent step-change in the country’s capacity to go ahead and perform cryo-electron tomography, a technique that happens to bridge the gap between cells as well as structural biology with high-resolution.

In case combined with the subtomogram averaging, it enables the determination of molecular structures wherein they sit inside the cell. Apart from this, the Krios is going to be offering an uplift in capacity for single-particle evaluation and also raise capacity in terms of emerging techniques like microcrystal electron diffraction.

The fact is that Australian researchers can now very effectively compete with researchers from overseas and make use of cryo-EM as well as cryo-ET so as to see biological samples at a near atomic resolution, hence driving advances when it comes to biomedicine.

At present, the most intensive users when it comes to the new Krios G4 and also the previous generation Krios K1 happen to be the leading experts from the world at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. Notably, their usage of Krios platforms is going to continue to underpin explorations within infectious diseases, cancer, heart diseases, antibiotic resistance, and also neurological diseases.

Georg Ramm, the Associate Professor and Director at the Ramaciotti Centre for Cryo-EM and also the Lab Head at the Monash BDI, is going to be making use of the instrument as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative imaging scientist grant that he has received. Significantly, the project looks to create workflows in terms of cryo-tomography within tissues so that the researchers can as well study the tissues’ molecular architecture in disease and health.

He is going to be working directly with the collaborators so as to use cryo-tomography in order to answer fundamental biomedical questions as well as teach new techniques to cell as well as structural biologists. The Titan Krios G4 launch happens to represent a leap ahead in the capabilities to reveal the basic building blocks of the body, the acumen that is indeed necessary for driving medical research along with innovation in Australia.