Ashoka University inaugurated the Ashoka-Zeiss Core Imaging Facility, which consists of four “high resolution, super resolution, and high content microscopes” from Zeiss, a German-origin optics and optoelectronics company, on 16th December. This facility, located in the basement of the Trivedi School of Biosciences (TSB) in the new Academic Block 05 (AC-05), houses all four microscopes together and is one of a kind in the country. It is expected to meet the advanced imaging needs of researchers working in cell biology, biophysics, structural biology among other disciplines.
This partnership is not limited to sourcing microscopes for the facility; it also intends to develop workshops, summer programmes and training for individuals to operate these high-end equipments. The facility will be available ‘free of cost’ to researchers across India for at least the next two years.
At the event, Vice Chancellor Dr. Somak Raychaudhary remarked that while Ashoka focused on the humanities and social sciences in the beginning, with the promise to eventually build up the sciences, with the inauguration of the Zeiss imaging facility and the imminent launch of the physical TSB facility (slated for February 8th, 2025), the growth of pure sciences into the campus and the inculcation of “. . . a research environment around [STEM] [..] is now happening.”
The inauguration event consisted of talks from scientists and entrepreneurs, including Dr. K VijayRaghavan, Chair, Science Advisory Council, Ashoka University; Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean of Research and Professor of Biology and Physics; and Mr. Ashok Trivedi, Founder of Trivedi School of Biosciences (TSB) and Ashoka University. Trivedi laid down the genesis and vision of the TSB, while Menon delved into research at Ashoka; current and future scope, available technology, and access. VijayRaghavan spoke about the unique advantage the Ashoka-Zeiss collaboration gives to interdisciplinary research given Ashoka's liberal arts ethos.
Dr. Jack Szostak, 2009 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, and members of Ashoka’s science advisory council, namely Dr. Yamuna Krishnan, Professor of Chemistry, University of Chicago, and Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor of Astronomy & Physics, Yale University, also delivered lectures presenting their ongoing research during the event.
Potential of the Microscope Facility
The imaging facility houses the following microscopes: Zeiss Lattice Lightsheet 7, Zeiss Elyra 7 LS (Lattice SIM2) with dual camera sCMOS camera, Zeiss LSM 980 NLO, and Zeiss Cell Discoverer 7 with LSM 900 Airyscan. In conversation with The Edict, Dr. Anurag Agrawal, Dean of TSB, spoke about the benefits of having “advanced imaging” technology in TSB. He believes that the facility “allows [one] to image living systems all the way from single cells to organelles inside cells to entire tissues and even small organisms,” without killing the cells.
Mr. Rishi Kant, Product Application Sales Specialist, APAC (Asia-Pacific) Region, Zeiss, in an interview with The Edict, said that Ashoka is the first private university in India to house the Lattice Lightsheet 7 Microscope. He believes that having all four microscopes under one roof is the game-changing factor for the university. With the available system in the imaging facility, “any type of fluorescently tagged samples, i.e., fixed samples, life samples, cell culture, cell line, [and] model organism” experiments can be performed with better spatial and temporal resolution, depth of penetration imaging, and high throughput imaging, said Mr. Kant.
Using an example to elaborate on the potential of the microscopes, Agrawal said that the one could hypothetically put an entire mouse with a window cut into the skull below the objective lens of the Zeiss LSM 980 NLO microscope and “look at the brain activity in the top millimetre or two of the brain.’
This is just one of the many ways in which researchers can make use of the depth of these microscopes. Researchers can also look at brain sections or even an entire living mouse using confocal microscopy. “You can go to a depth of 1.5 millimetres, which would contain millions, billions of neurons. And you could see what happens as you stimulate the mouse,” he adds.
Agrawal predicts that because of the dedicated infrastructure, “Ashoka in biosciences [...] will be in a leadership position amongst universities within [...] a couple of years.” The immediate beneficiaries of the microscopy facility in TSB will be PhD and master's students, especially the ones interested in biotechnology students, and people looking for imaging-related jobs, he adds.
Ashoka-Zeiss Collaboration
Anupama Ambika Anilkumar, Deputy Director of Ashoka Global Research Alliance (AGRA), played a key role in establishing the line of communication between Ashoka University and Zeiss Group, which eventually led to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between them in November 2023 to set up the Ashoka-Zeiss Core Imaging Facility.
Given the collaborative nature of the MoU, Zeiss offered us a “huge discount” to Ashoka. Anilkumar confirmed. Kant says that Ziess plans to station two engineers in the facility for the next three years and has also offered extended warranty and support on the microscopes in comparison to the one-year global standard. Having on-site engineers can help in proper maintenance and usage of the system and also train researchers to operate the equipment and generate publication quality images from their samples.
Very few people globally have the capability to work on these relatively new high-tech systems, and these programs will train certified researchers to be skilled enough to access these microscopes to further research in biosciences, said Kant. This is a “win-win” situation for all stakeholders, he added.
Vijay Raghavan, who is also a part of AGRA, spoke to The Edict about his vision for future summer programs that Ashoka plans to offer in collaboration with Zeiss. He envisions the programs to match the standard of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory or the Marine Biological Laboratory. But offer courses across the sciences, which “broadens the base of research in the country,” he said.
Anilkumar mentions that under this partnership, Ashoka and Zeiss plan to offer summer courses over the next summer for individuals from all over India. Based on her previous experience as the assistant director and program lead of Ashoka’s Lodha Genius Program (LGP), a fully funded high school summer program with a heavy focus on science and mathematics, she feels that these courses will help encourage more students to choose Ashoka for pursuing their education in fields like biology, physics, and chemistry.
14 out of 200 students who attend the LGP in 2024 have applied to the first round (two rounds still remain) of applications for the upcoming undergraduate cohort of 2029 (UG’29), says Anilkumar.
Interdisciplinary research partnerships at Ashoka
Both Vijay Raghavan and Agrawal feel that the concept of Liberal Arts has always included the Sciences. Agrawal believes that universities identify as liberal arts and science institutions for communication purposes. “It is best to use current and contextual usages of words as opposed to historically correct users. Because ultimately you're trying to communicate a message, you're not trying to be correct,” he says.
Hiroshi Hamada, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Biology at Ashoka University and Visiting Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, feels that Ashoka is focusing more on the sciences now because equipment in these disciplines requires a lot of money. A new liberal arts university can only generate such funds once it establishes itself through world-class humanities and social science departments. Ashoka is finally in a position to attract enough funds to properly develop its sciences, he adds.
Agrawal highlights that TSB was always supposed to be an “interdisciplinary school” and has already been collaborating with different centres and departments since its inception. He points to a recent collaboration between TSB and the Isaac Centre for Policy Policy (ICPP) for research in health policy.
Ashoka has indeed tried to focus on interdisciplinary research in the last few years. In 2023, researcher Sanjna Banerjee offered a course called Neuroscience and Health Through Theatre, introducing LGP students to an interaction between the fields of Performing Arts and Neuroscience. In fact, TSB, the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS), and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Archaeological Research (CIAR) are a few examples of interdisciplinary research centres at Ashoka.
3CS focuses on measures to reduce the impact of future challenges of climate change. It currently employs faculty members from nine departments. CIAR aims to better understand the Indian past through interdisciplinary, field-based projects in Archaeology and the Sciences.
According to Anilkumar, it is this interdisciplinarity within the institution that will give research in science at Ashoka the edge over big legacy institutions like the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) if it is to become a research industry leader in Sciences in the near future. VijayRaghavan adds that while he thinks that “strong disciplinary work of quality is perfectly fine,” what sets Ashoka apart is its refusal to stick to “disciplinary silos.”
He believes that complex problems of today require a variety of specialists to address the question. “This ability to collaborate widely is some flexibility which Ashoka has, which many of our institutions which are bigger […] don't think in ways to use it,” he says. Kant, however, thinks that although the Ashoka-Zeiss Microscopy Facility specifically will help increase research collaborations between the pure sciences departments, he does not see instant partnership with the social sciences, given the highly technical nature of the microscopes.
VijayRaghavan deems sophisticated equipment as a necessary component for allowing researchers to look at previously answered questions from a completely different lens to potentially update beliefs; more necessary, he, however, emphasises, is the growth of Ashoka’s research ethos. It would be “very exciting,” he says, if scholars from all over the world were to choose Ashoka as their destination to conduct path-breaking STEM research—the university must also, however, “have the ability to keep [top scholars].”
VijayRaghavan concludes: “[Ashoka] students, postdocs, and faculty should be so attractive to other people in the world that they've tried to grab them, and you as an institution should be so good that . . . you can keep them."
The writer is Department Editor, News, AY 2024-25.
Edited by Keerthana Panchanathan (UG'26).
Comments