The Otago Centre for Electron Microscopy, in the university anatomy department, has five electron microscopes but its latest, largely Japanese-made cryo-transmission electron microscope is capable of key tasks the others cannot perform.
And it can magnify specimens at least one million-fold, much greater than the 300,000-fold magnification of the centre's earlier electron transmission microscope.
The microscope is the only one of its configuration in the country, and has ''electron tomography'' capability.
This means it can produce high resolution 3-D reconstructions of viruses and nanoparticles in a new way and is ''ideally suited for single particle reconstruction''.
The machine has been installed and is expected to begin operating early next year.
The high resolution images produced are likely to provide new insights into a host of scientific fields, including in human health, where much more detailed information about the way viruses interact with individual cells and about the subtleties of brain circuitry is likely to advance scientific understanding.
A neuroscientist at the anatomy department, Associate Prof Dorothy Oorschot, who chairs the centre management committee, said the microscope, was a ''major development'' for the university.
She will use the new equipment to study circuitry in part of the brain which controls movement. Another advantage is the microscope views frozen biological specimens at up to minus 180degC.
Because the biological sections do not have to be preserved by using chemical fixatives, key microstructures can be viewed more clearly, and in closer to their natural state.
Dr Mihnea Bostina, the recently appointed centre academic director, who is also a microbiology and immunology senior lecturer, wants to study the detailed surface structure of certain naturally occurring viruses which attack cancer cells in humans.
Such viruses could be potentially useful as anti-cancer therapies but tended to be themselves attacked and destroyed by the body's immune system.
Understanding the mechanical facts about the way such viruses and individual cancer cells ''locked'' together could help ultimately develop a new generation of smart drugs which could target cancer cells more precisely, he said.
