Every five years, Australia produces National Research Infrastructure Roadmaps to help identify Australia’s research infrastructure needs, set priorities, and guide investment. They aim to ensure that Australian researchers can access the instruments, data, and expertise they need. The 2026 Roadmap is being developed this year, and will act as a key policy document, providing guidance to government on the actions needed to enable researchers to maintain excellence, increase innovation and address emerging challenges.
Last year, we conducted a ‘Future Needs Survey’ to help us develop our future investment plan. Thank you to those who contributed for your essential input on this. Microscopy Australia enables discovery and applied research that finds solutions for important challenges facing our society. We do this through our support for the instruments and experts around the country. Our future focus is on tackling three of these national challenges: achieving Net Zero, improving health and crops, and building a circular resources economy for the future. Managing data to support discovery in these areas is also an essential area for investment.
Future planned investments will focus on advanced transmission electron microscopy (TEM) instruments with electron energy loss spectroscopy that can reveal the atomic bonding of chemicals for future energy generation and storage technologies. This will include ensuring Australian access to next-generation direct electron detector technology for faster data acquisition, higher image quality, and less electron beam damage on sensitive samples.
Pursuing investments that continue to provide access to advances in cryo-TEM will enable more protein structures to be revealed, allowing new drug targets and vaccine candidates to be identified and developed. Investments in volume soft-X-ray, spatial omics and multi-modal microscopy are being explored to provide correlative solutions for greater insights from larger biological samples.
Australian researchers need to be able to analyse samples from mineral exploration and processing to urban mining of e-waste. Next-generation investments in spectral and dynamic micro-CT for large samples and large geometry SIMS are planned, along with support to increase automation and throughput.
We have heard that there is an urgent need for an uplift in the microscopy data support, including solutions for data analysis tools and pipelines, data provenance and metadata standards, and training for image analysis.
Microscopy Australia will release our 10-Year Plan for consultation later this year. Feedback from the microscopy and microanalysis community, along with research communities and industry stakeholders, will be essential to prioritising investments to ensure continued open access for Australian researchers. Keep an eye out for more details.
Micrographs from Microscopy Australia supported research: including pest resistant crops, a universal pneumococcal vaccine, a future alloy, and a treatment for antibiotic resistant bacteria.
August 14, 2025
