Preclinic

The Core Facility was founded in 2025 and brings together specialised units and an administrative interface. An easily accessible infrastructure, qualified services and professional advice support researchers from the planning of their first scientific experiment to publication.

Five units together form the Preclinical Core Facility: the existing Core Facilities Animal Laboratory and Transgenic Models, as well as the newly established units Microscopy (headed by Dr Quirin Krabichler), Single Cell Laboratory (headed by PD Dr Stephanie Witt) and the Research Assistance Team.

The microscopy unit centralises modern microscopes for various imaging techniques. These include a confocal laser scanning microscope, a fluorescence slide scanner microscope, a computer workstation for the IMARIS 3D microscopy image analysis software, a live-cell imaging module for the confocal microscope, an ultramicrotome for sample preparation for electron microscopy, and a fluorescence stereomicroscope for sample preparation. The team is responsible for the administration and maintenance of the microscopes and workstations, instruction and training of user groups, scientific advice on microscopy projects, and investment and strategic planning for new microscopy technologies. The high-quality microscopy infrastructure enables excellent research into the biological causes of neurological diseases.

The Single Cell Laboratory supports research groups in all project phases – from experimental design and optimal methodology to data interpretation. The laboratory performs standardised tissue processing, cell or cell nucleus isolation, and the creation of single-cell libraries for subsequent high-throughput sequencing. On the bioinformatics side, stringent quality control of the raw data is performed, followed by normalisation and dimension reduction procedures to identify cell types, differentiation states, or expression signatures. In addition, application-specific downstream analyses are offered, such as gene network analyses, signalling pathway analyses, or in silico identification of targets for drug development. This creates a robust basis for precision medicine and disease-specific questions.

The Research Assistance Team is the central interface between research and infrastructure and pursues two guiding principles: establishing and maintaining sustainable structures and providing direct support to users. Uniform quality standards guarantee reproducibility, transparency and the highest data quality.

The Preclinical Core Facility sees itself as a technical infrastructure and a dynamic platform for collaborative research. It is thus a driver of synergies and knowledge transfer between working groups, disciplines and scientific cooperation partners.