CONFOCAL MICROSCOPE
Enhanced imaging of fluorescently labeled specimens using a LSM 510 META scanning confocal microscope
Lasers
- Argon laser with excitation lines at 458, 477, 488, 514 nm
- Green HeNe laser at 543 nm
- Red HeNe laser at 633 nm
- Coherent Chameleon ULTRA software tunable Titanium:Sapphire laser (680 - 1040 nm) for multi-photon excitation.
Microscope
Zeiss AxioPlan 2IE MOT upright motorized microscope, with the following objectives:
- Plan 100x oil 1.4 n.a. Differential Interference Contrast (DIC)
- Plan 63x 1.4 n.a. DIC
- Plan Neo 40x oil 1.3 n.a. DIC
- C-Apochromat 40x 1.2 n.a. DIC for fluorescence correlation spectroscopy
- Achroplan 40x 0.8 n.a. water DIC for live cell work
- Plan Neo 20x 0.75 n.a. DIC
- Plan Apo 10x
System Resources
- Imaging of most standard fluorophores, in either single-photon or multi-photon modes.
- Simultaneous fluorescent and DIC imaging of most samples
- Heated, motorized stage for live cell imaging.
- Real time measurements of cell migration, ion flux and metabolic profiling (NADH, FP)
- META scanning module with 32 narrow wavelength band single-channel detectors that can be used for spectra-based experiments.
- Separation of fluorophores with closely-spaced emission peaks by linear un-mixing
- Generation of fluorophore-specific spectra
- Background subtraction
- Intensity based measurements of protein-protein interactions in live and fixed samples using FRET techniques
- Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS).
- Study of molecular dynamics in living cells
- Generation of diffusion coefficients
- Time-correlated single photo counting (TCSPC) using a Becker & Hickl spectroscopy system.
- Lifetime-based measurements of protein-protein interactions in fixed and living samples using FRET/FLIM techniques
- Software for FRET, FRAP and FLIM applications, ratiometric imaging, and complex time series experiments.
Additional Equipment
- Total Internal Reflection Fluorscence (TIRF) imaging on an inverted Olympus microscope (488 nm excitation).
- Single molecule bleaching and observations
- High axial resolution renderings of the features and events on the plasma membrane in living cells