Maísa Antunes hates to fly, but sometimes it can’t be avoided. A postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Antunes needed to go to Parnaíba, a city on the country’s northern coast, to conduct a microscopy training session. While booking her flight, she studied the diagram of nine available seats. “I thought maybe these were the best places on the flight,” she recalls. “At check-in, I realized that the picture was not the best places — they were the only places. There were nine seats on the flight!” She took a moment to muster her courage before boarding the tiny craft. “It was not even possible to stand straight in that plane,” she says. “I thought, I can’t do this. But no, it was a good experience. I am here, I am alive, nothing happened. And because of this, I realized how difficult it is to travel in Brazil.”

Credit: FG Trade / Getty Images

Antunes and her advisor, cell biologist Gustavo Menezes, are dedicated to bringing advanced optical microscopy techniques to labs in every state in Brazil. Antunes herself has visited 14 of Brazil’s 26 states, and her travels have given her a rich perspective on the country’s diversity. Particularly in the northwestern areas of the country, travel between states is logistically challenging. Even to make a short trip between neighboring states, Antunes said, a traveler generally has to fly all the way south to São Paulo to change planes, often requiring a full day of travel. “Or you can take a boat for three days on the river,” she says. “I was really shocked when I realized that.” This cumbersome process made her realize the obstacles researchers there face to obtain supplies and equipment promptly. “They feel like no one cares about them,” she says. “They have a lot of incredible ideas, and its frustrating to have good ideas and no way to do them.”

In the remote city of Parnaíba, Brazil, Maísa Antunes conducts practical training with students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend university. “Encountering such dedication reinforced our commitment to bringing scientific knowledge to underserved regions where it is a vital tool for progress,” Antunes says. Credit: Maísa Mota Antunes

Antunes and Menezes are part of a growing global movement to improve access to optical microscopy tools and training. Much of this work is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) under a program called Expanding Global Access to Bioimaging, which awards three-year grants to applicants in historically underfunded countries who are increasing the use of imaging technologies in biomedical research, either by building infrastructure, training researchers in imaging techniques, or building the imaging community. “We recognized a critical gap in the research ecosystem: the need for effective collaboration across disciplines — an area often overlooked by both local and international funders,” says Vlad Ghukasyan, senior program manager for CZI. “We’re supporting organizations that connect people across expertise and geographical regions, and we’re already seeing results. These networks are bringing folks together, speeding up innovation, spreading new ideas, and pushing science forward.”

Regional bioimaging networks are also forming to help scientists connect with one another, fostering collaborations and opening communication. These include the Africa Microscopy Initiative (AMI) and Latin America BioImaging (LABI). At a recent conference hosted by the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, participants gathered from all over the world to share ideas and experiences in dissemination of microscopy to underserved communities. The conference brought together representatives from Global BioImaging (GBI) and other regional organizations, funding agencies and open-access imaging centers to discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Bringing opportunity home

Menezes became fired up about democratizing access to imaging technology after doing a postdoc in Canada. “It was a huge shock for me,” he recalls. “For the first time in my life, I saw a confocal microscope.” He says that while graduate students in Brazil do good, rigorous research, they are constrained by a lack of access to imaging equipment. In Canada, Menezes learned to do surgery on mice using intravital microscopy, and he developed a method to characterize the molecular signals involved in recruiting white blood cells to a site of inflammation1. That work led to a prestigious publication — and a personal epiphany. “I needed to come back to try to bring all those techniques inside Brazil,” he says. "There are a lot of guys like me in Brazil, they have the same brilliance, but we are limited because those microscopes are only available outside Brazil.” Rather than pursue a faculty position in Canada, he decided to return and make an impact in his home country. “In 2010 we established the first confocal microscope in Latin America that was dedicated to bioimaging,” he says. “Anyone who wants to can come to my lab to do surgery on a living mouse, exactly like I did in Canada.”

When he heard about a researcher in the state of Amazonas who had a grant to hire someone to develop techniques, Menezes applied. He was accepted and then spent the next two years traveling monthly to Amazonas. “It’s 3,000 km away from my place,” he says. “It’s in the Amazon jungle. It’s the poorest state in Brazil. And in the end, we managed to write a grant to buy the first confocal microscope in the north of Brazil.” After the principal investigators and students started collecting data with the microscope, he says, their research plans exploded in all directions. “Once they started to see images, to see cells moving, they said, ‘Let’s apply to buy a flow cytometer, let’s apply to do PCR, let’s collaborate with my guy in São Paulo who does RNA sequencing’,” he says. “It opened a box that was closed only because they couldn’t see their cells. They started to have more students, more grants, more papers; everything changed for them.”

Menezes realized early on that microscopes typically come standard with lots of features that an individual lab might not need. He worked with Nikon to design an instrument containing just the components necessary for bioimaging, modifications that he says lowered the price by a factor of ten. “They started to sell these microscopes to everybody in Brazil,” Menezes says. He and Antunes travel to other institutions to help people discover what they can do with the equipment they already have, whether it’s an expensive instrument that everyone is afraid of breaking, a simple basic microscope or even a smartphone. “What they all have in common is the smile,” he says. “That is amazing. When they look through the screen and they see cells moving for the first time, they are so happy. This project has healed a lot inside me, about humanity, about faith in human beings.”

In Rio Branco, Brazil, students perform intravital microscopy of a mouse intestine using a basic white-light microscope, capturing images and videos with a cell phone camera. Credit: Maísa Mota Antunes

“Frugal science”

Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash similarly believes that anyone can do high-quality research using inexpensive microscopes. “I grew up in India, and it’s part and parcel of how I think about science,” Prakash explains. “Access to tools was one of the most important bottlenecks that I saw in the progress of science. I had seen it firsthand, and when I started my lab in 2011, I had an opportunity to do something about it.”

First, Prakash designed the Foldscope, an optical microscope assembled from cardstock and a lens and costing less than $1 to produce — a perfect embodiment of his philosophy of “frugal science.” India’s Department of Biotechnology partnered with Prakash to distribute the devices to students throughout the country, and in Africa, users employ the paper scope to diagnose diseases such as malaria. From his work designing, producing and distributing the Foldscope, Prakash says he learned a lot about conducting community-driven projects, and he’s applying those lessons to another frugal science endeavor: an imaging setup called Squid (Simplifying Quantitative Imaging Development and Deployment) and its clinical-grade counterpart, Octopi.

Squid is a system of modular components that can be assembled into a variety of microscopes depending on the user’s needs. “At this point, there are 37 different kinds of microscopes that we have demonstrated that work and operate with the same modular tools,” Prakash says. He points out that, too often, the dynamic around an institution’s microscope is that it is too fragile and expensive for just anyone to use — even in well-resourced environments. With Squid, the design is intentionally robust, and users are encouraged to take it apart and reassemble it and modify it as much as they like. “All the software is open on GitHub, and that started this chain reaction three or four years ago,” he says. “Many of the partners that joined brought completely new applications that we were not thinking about.” In Liberia, researchers developed an Ebola assay using the device; in Cambodia, tools to perform an ELISA test for dengue. A group in Latin America is building a microfluidics component to add on.

“People want to build new things,” Prakash says. “When you share these microscopy-based tools openly and the AI engine that comes with it, other individuals are capable of building completely new applications.” So far, there are around 150 Squid units in labs around the world; one has even gone to space, Prakash says. There is now a manufacturing facility, called Cephla, to build and distribute the core components of Squid and Octopi, for researchers who want out-of-the-box rather than do-it-yourself scopes. “We need to be able to deliver on the promise of mass production of low-cost microscopy,” Prakash says. “Anybody can still build and contribute on top of them.” The user-created additions are, like the core components, freely available online. It’s important, he says, that the researchers using Squid share the philosophy of open access. “If there is a completely new application, it’s actually better for the academic groups to build on top of it,” he says. “If I figure out something new to do with this platform and I share that back, everybody else that’s using the platform should have access to it.”

Prakash is working with partners in countries including Senegal, Madagascar, Liberia and Congo to develop a country-scale strategy to build imaging communities where researchers develop new tools and share them peer-to-peer, rather than in a hub-and-spoke model. He envisions a future in which optical imaging technology becomes as common and readily available as cell phones and personal computers. “It’s like the wireless moment for science,” he says. “We could leapfrog biomedical research in many countries.”

The case for core facilities

Teng-Leong Chew is the director of the Advanced Imaging Center (AIC) at Janelia Research Campus, an open-access imaging center that accepts proposals from researchers anywhere in the world to come and use its instruments. In their first eight years, Chew says, the AIC received only a single proposal from Africa. In 2020, Chew launched the Imaging Africa workshop to expand awareness of microscopy technology throughout the continent, provide training in microscopy techniques and encourage collaboration among African scientists. The success of that workshop highlighted the need for more long-term efforts, and in 2022, the AMI was born2.

“The creation of the Africa Microscopy Initiative has drastically raised the awareness of microscopy in Africa,” Chew says. “More importantly, it has raised the simple realization that they are not alone; that everybody is trying to work together, but they are just not connected.” In the last few years, the number of African applications to the AIC has increased substantially, and they now make up 10–20% of proposals. “The fact that people apply means that they have hope,” Chew says. “They are no longer feeling that they are excluded, and this kind of change of mentality is actually extremely important.”

In addition to outreach and education projects, AMI maintains an open-access imaging center at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Researchers working at any African nonprofit institution may submit proposals to come and use the instruments, and AMI will cover the costs, including travel and lodging, as well as provide post-visit image analysis support. While that’s a great opportunity, it has proved challenging for researchers to plan research proposals around an instrument they’ve never used.

Caron Jacobs of the University of Cape Town is a co-founder of the African BioImaging Consortium (ABIC), which formed in 2022, building on the success of Imaging Africa. “In Africa, there are challenges on every front,” she says. “We have to hit all fronts at the same time.” It’s difficult to convince institutions to fund equipment if the lab doesn’t have any personnel trained to use that equipment, for instance, but it’s frustrating for researchers to train to use instruments that they can no longer access after the training ends. In practice, this vicious cycle means that many researchers are not familiar enough with imaging capabilities to know where to begin designing experiments.

“How do you plan an assay if you’ve never used the technology before?” Jacobs points out. “It’s easy to completely underestimate the impact of being in an environment where multiple people are using the same applications and talking about how to plan an experiment. How to think about fluorescent proteins, how to think about focus, principles of optics,” she says. “We’ve been expecting researchers to magically pick things up because it’s available on the internet, but it’s like drinking water from a firehose.”

ABIC is working to expand collaboration between imaging scientists within Africa, in hopes of creating more peer-to-peer training and resource sharing, instead of researchers always looking to the global North for collaboration or equipment donation. “It’s a gear shift for a lot of African researchers,” Jacobs says. “Some institutions are happy to enable research in an open and collaborative way, but others are not.” By its nature, however, collaboration between the global North and South can create a difficult dynamic. ABIC is aimed at “building the community within Africa so that it’s an attractive, well-supported and collaborative partner for the rest of the world, on an equal footing,” Jacobs says, “more akin to an equitable collaboration partnership, as opposed to what often happens at the moment, either a charitable or extractive collaboration partnership.”

For instance, researchers in upper income countries may donate used instruments to African scientists without considering whether the recipient has the capacity to house them properly or the training to make good use of them. These donated instruments have no maintenance support from the manufacturer, and replacement parts may even be discontinued. “It is very easy to turn lower income countries into a dumping ground,” Chew says. He noticed that often, microscope companies offer trade-in discounts to entice users to upgrade. “A lot of these traded-in instruments are very new, just two or three years old, fully operational and well maintained,” Chew says. “These instruments sit in the warehouse until the company runs out of space, and then they go to the landfill. And that is just a heartbreaking waste of resources.”

To facilitate instrument donations without sacrificing customer support, AMI is launching a program called PEER, or Program for Equipment Exchange and Reutilization. The idea behind PEER, to start with, is that traded-in instruments can be donated to scientists in underserved areas with support from the manufacturer for installation and maintenance. AMI would also work with the recipient institution to ensure that the institution has a dedicated point person for the instrument and that that person has the training and support they need. “It’s a very new program still,” Chew says. “Once we learn more about the on-the-ground situation, what kind of challenges we face, then we will get smarter and make necessary changes.”

Another pitfall of unequal collaboration is the risk of ‘brain drain’. Sending people to train at state-of-the-art facilities can backfire, says neuroscientist Mahmoud Maina of the University of Sussex, UK. When these researchers return home, they can become demoralized because their training has outpaced the resources available to them. They may lose their motivation or start looking for ways to relocate out of the country. “What you really need is an opportunity where you have the equipment, and you have the training, and ideally, you also have funding to support people to collect some pilot data,” he says. “We cannot provide equipment to all institutions across Africa, so this is where the idea of hubs comes in.”

In 2021, Maina established a research center at Yobe State University in Nigeria called the Biomedical Science Research and Training Centre (BioRTC), which provides access to imaging equipment to scientists not only within Nigeria but from other countries in West Africa. Establishing the center as a core facility for imaging, he says, raises awareness about the research being done and helps unlock more local funding. “When local institutions see that there is already investment from external funders, they also want to make a similar investment,” he says. To launch the BioRTC, Maina began with funding from Wellcome Trust and CZI, and he collected donated equipment from institutions in other parts of the world. Thanks to the success of the project, the Nigerian government is now building them a dedicated facility. “It’s bringing people into the state to get trained,” he says. “In our first year, we had one or two lab spaces. In the second year, the government moved us into an interim site. Now we are completing a permanent site for the center, and they are giving us an annual budget.”

At BioRTC, a bioscience laboratory at Yobe State University in Nigeria, researchers and health professionals come from all over the region to participate in training workshops and use state-of-the-art equipment. Credit: BioRTC

Having a regional center avoids the problem of having to travel to facilities in Europe, North America or even South Africa, all places that can prove challenging in which to obtain a visa. It’s also a way to build momentum, Maina says, as researchers have the chance to network with other researchers in the local region. Ideally, he says, multiple such centers will be built all over Africa.

Despite the benefits provided by core facilities, individual researchers still may not have enough support at their home institutions to make the most of these shared resources. “When we train you at BioRTC, we tell you that now you automatically have access to these facilities,” he says. “You can come back and do your research. We would not charge you for any access to the equipment, but you just need to buy your antibodies.” Of the 300 or so people who have been trained at BioRTC, fewer than 10% have returned. “Some of the reason is because they don’t have the funds to buy the antibodies to be able to now come back and continue.”

Researchers in West Africa can apply for fellowships to travel to BioRTC and use the equipment there, including confocal microscopes, cell culture equipment, PCR systems and a 3D printer, to advance their research. Credit: BioRTC

Train the trainers

Maina began with foundation grants to create something that the government felt confident to fund, but sometimes the money flows the other way around. The partnership that evolved into LABI arose from a collaboration between the governments of Mexico and Uruguay; the organization met in person for the first time in 2021 as part of a Global BioImaging meeting. “We were strongly motivated by the international network that existed,” says Leonel Malacrida of the Advanced Bioimaging Unit (UBA), a core facility run jointly by Institut Pasteur de Montevideo and the Universidad de la República, Uruguay. He is also a founding member of LABI. The group received a CZI Global Access to Bioimaging grant in 2022, allowing them to hire administrative personnel and create a more formal organization, including working groups focused on outreach, training and education, communications, and other areas. “We are excited because we’ve grown quite a lot in a short time,” Malacrida says. “It has been really an amazing time to part of it.”

LABI’s mission invokes three pillars: building capacities, with activities such as training workshops; building community, through annual meetings and other events; and promoting global integration with the international bioimaging community. In June of this year, LABI hosted its first ‘train the trainers’ workshop in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Staff from microscopy facilities in various countries attended to learn how to lead a course in the fundamentals of optical microscopy at their home institution. Malacrida has been running microscopy workshops at UBA for six years, and the idea behind the LABI workshops is to create a support network for imaging facility staff. “One of the big aims that we pursue is to facilitate a community of trainers that can help each other,” Malacrida says. “When you are the only one running a core facility, or even just one or two microscopes, this can be overwhelming if you want to run a course.”

While there are a number of core facilities throughout Latin America, “the situation in the region is diverse,” Malacrida says. “LABI has been very important in the understanding of the value of core facilities in the region — it was not that well understood even two or three years ago.” Traditionally, the view has been that institutional resources are for use by staff of that institution, not open to any scientist who comes knocking. The culture of resource sharing is beginning to catch on, but Latin America has some key differences from Europe that pose challenges. For instance, there’s no Latin American equivalent of the European Union, and it can be difficult to coordinate among different countries and governments. “You cannot have, for instance, an agency for research and innovation that can fund technology or research [across borders],” Malacrida points out. “You cannot support LABI through a regional government. If you have funding from Brazil, this funding cannot be used in Uruguay to pay a person who is hired here.”

Conversely, Latin America has certain advantages over Europe. For instance, it can be easier for Africans to get visas to Latin American countries than to those in Europe or North America. “Something that really gives me a lot of hope is that there is a lot of room for South–South collaboration,” he says. At this year’s LABI training workshop, for instance, three African scientists applied to participate. Recently, a Nigerian scientist who received a donated instrument for spectral imaging reached out to Malacrida because he has expertise in this area, to see whether he would host a student and train him. Malacrida agreed, and travel funding was procured. “Now, we will open opportunities for this facility in Nigeria that will help many others in the region, with technology that they own,” he says. “These are the things that for me are most exciting.”

Southeast Asia rising

Neuroscientist Satoshi Ogawa of Monash University Malaysia first got involved with GBI two years ago, thanks to an invitation from a colleague who was hosting a bioimaging workshop in Japan. That workshop led to Ogawa attending the 2023 GBI meeting in South Africa, where he connected with others around the world who were addressing similar issues to what he was tackling in Malaysia. “Whenever we try to do bioimaging experiments, we’re restricted from the start because the infrastructure is not available,” he says. The GBI meeting was eye-opening, he says. Looking over GBI’s map of regional bioimaging networks, he noticed a glaring gap: Southeast Asia. “Except for Singapore, there was no one,” he says. “And in fact, in Malaysia, whenever we would like to access some imaging infrastructure, we don’t know who to talk to or where those instruments are available in this country.”

In Singapore, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) funds SingaScope, a microscopy infrastructure network that connects researchers throughout Singapore and facilitates the sharing of equipment and expertise. “One of the key achievements was building a comprehensive database of all the capabilities across Singapore, so that a user could search, could find the right equipment and, importantly, find the right expert to go and talk to,” says Graham Wright, director of the A*STAR microscopy platform.

Earlier this year, Ogawa and Chew organized a workshop in Malaysia where students and researchers interested in bioimaging could meet each other, share the problems they faced and discuss possible solutions. “We learned a lot,” Ogawa says. “What I heard many times is, ‘There is a microscope available, but no one knows how to use it’. Or, ‘The university doesn’t allocate money for maintenance costs, so these expensive machines never get utilized because of a lack of maintenance’.” Ogawa realized that building communication among researchers would have to come first, before seeking funding for more instruments. “Networking is the first step,” he says. Having a cohesive community will help illuminate what infrastructure is available and where, as well as what the most pressing needs are, not only within Malaysia but potentially throughout Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries.

“The ASEAN region is extremely well connected by relatively low-cost airlines, so it’s feasible for people to be moving around to access instrumentation,” says Wright. “And Singapore has a has a phenomenal fleet of instruments that it’s willing to share.” Wright is working closely with Ogawa to develop a bioimaging network to serve the ASEAN countries. First, they are reaching out to contacts in each country just to find out what is already being done and loop people in to trainings and resource sharing. “Later this year, we’re going to run a facility management course hosted here in Singapore,” Wright says. “We run a lot of events, and we’re now inspired to make sure that that we’re targeting the wider Southeast Asian community.”

When it comes to microscopy infrastructure, different countries may be in different stages of development, but all can benefit from robust local networks and increased participation in the global research ecosystem. “Ground-up community efforts can be very effective in making connections,” says Wright. “Organizations like Global BioImaging and others have helped create materials about how to speak to your funders, or how to engage with governments, and those initiatives have been very good, as well as demonstrating the impact and potential value that those efforts can make.”