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The RII Imaging Cores - Optical, in collaboration with the core's Faculty Research Advisory Committee (FRAC), was awarded internal equipment enhancement funds for their proposal to purchase a Zeiss Axio Observer 7 widefield microscope with an Apotome III attachment that gives confocal-like resolution and optical sectioning capabilities in samples up to about 20um in thickness. The Faculty lead on the proposal was Dr. Helena Morrison (College of Nursing) , along with co-PIs Dr. Erica Eggers and Dr. Art Rigel (both from the College of Medicine).

This new instrument will run using the ZEN software, which is familiar to the users of many of the other instruments in the core facility. It is a fully motorized widefield system and should enable the capture of up to 5 colors (4 visible light, 1 near-IR) in fluorescence widefield mode, and 4 colors using the Apotome.

The microscope will be located in Life Sciences North and expected installation is sometime in May 2023.

More information on the Apotome.

During the period between mid-August to mid-September all four of the major optical microscope vendors will be doing on-site demonstrations of very well equipped research-grade microscopes.

Why?

The managers of the RII Imaging Cores – Optical are evaluating microscopes, along with our faculty oversight committee, for a planned application to the UA’s equipment enhancement fund for core facilities, due September 28, 2022. The microscope would go in our core facility, probably in Life Sciences North. 

We are looking for a fully-motorized, computer-controlled widefield microscope with a color camera and a high-end fluorescence camera. The microscope would be similar to the popular Leica DMI6000 that we already have, with a few distinctives. The rationale for a second, somewhat similar, microscope is to avoid potentially overloading the schedule of existing Leica.

• Stereology software – A recent faculty hire has been promised stereology software from MBF Biosciences to be installed either on the DMI6000 or possibly on the proposed new microscope. The new software controls the microscope and cameras directly, acquiring images and performing the analyses on those images in real time. Stereology is an unbiased form of image analysis that relies on the math found in geometry and statistics. The technique is often used by brain and lung researchers, but it is not limited to those organs. For more information, see: https://www.stereology.info/stereology/
• Confocal-like images – We will be evaluating three microscopes with deconvolution software and one with a hardware structured illumination approach to obtaining crisp fluorescence images. Both approaches are robust and have been used in publications for many years. One of our goals is to provide a way for UAHS labs with thin samples (e.g., paraffin sectioned tissue or cultured cells) to obtain confocal-like fluorescence images without needing to travel to the very popular confocal microscope found in the Marley facility.

For the latest information on the schedule and the vendors that are coming, please see the Microscopy Month page on the Microscopy Alliance website.

Mr. Doug Cromey served as a lecturer for the Optical Microscopy & Imaging in the Biomedical Sciences course, Woods Hole Marine Biological Institute, Woods Hole, MA. His presentation was entitled “Ethics & Scientific Digital Imaging”.

Mr. Cromey is the co-manager of the RII Imaging Cores - Optical and a 1998 alumni of the OMIBS course.

On February 10, 2021 Mr. Doug Cromey was an invited seminar speaker for The Rockefeller Institute in New York, NY. His presentation was entitled “Everyone Is Entitled to His Own Opinion, but Not His Own Facts: Avoiding Fake Views in Digital Imaging”. https://www.rockefeller.edu/events-and-lectures/49389-everyone-is-entitled-to-his-own-opinion-but-not-his-own-facts-avoiding-fake-views-in-digital-imaging/

Mr. Cromey is the co-manager of the RII Imaging Cores - Optical.

In May and June of 2021 the computer workstations in the RII Imaging Cores - Optical were upgraded to new HP hardware and are now running Microsoft Windows 10. The computers for the two Zeiss LSM880 instruments in Marley also received new real-time controllers, essentially a computer on a board that controls all the microscope hardware. The Zeiss Elyra S.1 received both a new instrument and post-processing computer. Other computers in Marley (LSM880 offline workstation, Stereo microscope computer) were given operating system software updates to bring them up to Windows 10.

The leftover computers have been put to good use. The image analysis workstation in LSN received a long overdue update, and the Imaging Cores - Electron facility will use one of the workstations to begin offering image analysis services. An additional Zeiss ZEN installation has been set up in the Marley location.

Our thanks to Drs Zarnescu and Eggers for submitting the LSN upgrade proposal. We also appreciate Dr. Helena Morrison for submitting the upgrade proposal for the Marley location.

The RII Equipment Enhancement Fund is designed to add or augment research capacity through the acquisition of equipment for use by multiple investigators in shared facilities or approved university core facilities.