Advanced Multiscale Biological Imaging using European Infrastructures

The Advanced Multiscale Biological Imaging using European Infrastructures (AMBER) consortium has been assembled for exploitation and development of large-scale European infrastructures to address key needs for biological imaging over length scales from molecular, through cellular, to tissue, organ and organism levels of organisation. It brings together a wide range of competence including clinical practitioners, biological and biomedical scientists, physical scientists, and facility/infrastructure scientists.

This initiative is being made at a time when remarkable changes are occurring on the scientific landscape in terms of facility developments, data management, and data analysis and interpretation. It is hard to imagine a time for which there has been a bigger need to bring together communities from different fields in an adaptive and progressive way.

The current gap between clinical and fundamental science is a great challenge given the importance of relating in vitro biomedical research with in vivo and ex vivo results. The AMBER consortium and the programme has been designed to bridge these fields - at a time in which there are massive technical and methodological developments in Europe at central facility X-ray and neutron beam sources, and complementary techniques.

There is also explosive growth and increasing convergence in the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches. AMBER will bring together and enable medical, biological, and methodological capabilities in an unprecedented way, with a profound potential impact for Europe's next generation

research and next generation researchers.

Work will include technique development, particularly in terms of combining imaging techniques and data to provide an overall picture of life processes in the context of disease, as well as imaging of challenging disease relevant samples and systems, including ex vivo, in vivo samples and medical technology objects, analysis and modelling. The programme will create closer ties to and between biomedical and clinical communities, opening the research infrastructures to new users of the knowledge generated.

It will also bring high level interdisciplinary and multi-technique expertise alongside world-leading infrastructure capability to focus on problems of fundamental value to human health. The following committed partnering organisations will bring in unique competence and capability: The Lund Institute of Advanced Neutron and X-ray Science (LINXS), the MAX IV Laboratory, Lund, the European Spallation Source (ESS), Lund, the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), the Institute for Structural and Chemical Biology within the University of Leicester, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and the International Institute of Molecular Mechanisms and Machines (IMOL), of the Polish Academy of Sciences.