X-Ray Imaging

The X-Ray Imaging Team, led by Liz Duke, provide a synchrotron-based X-ray micro-tomography facility for biological samples. We are located at the EMBL P14 beamline of the PETRA III synchrotron light source, on the DESY campus in Hamburg (Germany).

Our setup, which we call High-Throughput Tomography (HiTT), uses synchrotron X-rays to perform high-resolution scans of samples of sizes in the millimetre range. The high intensity of the X-rays makes it possible to image at a high speed: for samples below about 2 mm in size, data acquisition and reconstruction of the 3D data takes less than five minutes, which, because we also use a robot, enables us to scan a large number of samples in a moderate amount of time.

Experiments involving X-ray soft imaging of biological tissue can be performed at the EMBL beamline P14, at the PETRA III storage ring at DESY (Hamburg, Germany), coordinated by the X-ray Imaging Team led by Liz Duke. Users can apply specifically for X-ray imaging (XIMG) beamtime via the EMBL Hamburg beamtime application process.

HiTT pipeline