The UCD Light Microscopy facility is located at the Fitzsimons Campus, RC-1 North building, 7th floor.
We offer four advanced microscopes - Deltavision digital deconvolution, Zeiss two photon, Olympus spinning disk confocal, and Olympus TIRF - for campus faculty and trainees.
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FUNDING
Start-up. To get the facility up and running, the Dean of the School of Medicine provided crucial funds for renovations and temporary management of the facility. These funds came from the Academic Enrichment Fund, which derives from clinical income.
Equipment.The instruments were purchased with funds from multiple NIH Shared Instrumentation Grants obtained by the BNAT (Basic Neuroscience Advanced Training) Program, and pooled in this central facility by participants on those grants.
Ongoing maintenance. To keep the Light Microscopy facility going, we operate like National Public Radio, and depend on users for support (no pledge drives though), with options like hourly billing, yearly contracts, and especially line-item commitments in grant applications.
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Thinking about becoming a user?
When it opened, the Light Microscopy facility was not for everyone. We focussed on advanced instrumentation. We still do all that, but now in addition we can accommodate just about anybody, with any level of experience. So if you need a quick confocal picture for a grant or a presentation, you can get it fast.
For the more advanced instruments, training usually requires two sessions, each lasting a few hours, preferably using your own specimens. So for a few hundred dollars, a trainee can become an independent user of a machine that costs more than a half-million dollars.
At the outset of training, we require a valid Speed Type number for billing. Contact us to get started: steven.fadul@uchsc.edu
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Opening Ceremony - 2002
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Goals
Provide instruments for faculty;
Acquire new instruments in this rapidly developing field;
Train and educate students, postdocs, and faculty in the general field of photonics, with special emphasis on light microscopy.
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Service
Researchers are trained to use the microscopes and image acquisition software themselves, with staff assistance when necessary. Data are exported and processed off-line using workstations in the facility or in investigators' labs.
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Policies
No radioactivity.
No adding or modifying software on the computers.
No Speed Type? No access.
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Wish List
These instruments are expensive. Updating existing equipment and aquiring new instruments rely on the cooperative efforts of many faculty. Here are some things that we would like to acquire. If any of these interests you, let us know and we'll put you in touch with other like-minded people.
Workstation. $7,500. PC with Zeiss 510 image processing software so images can be processed without tying up the microscope.
Metamorph Software. $20,000. Advanced image processing software.
UV Laser. $70,000. Needed for uncaging drugs and ions and bleaching some natural fluorophores.
Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) microscope. $250,000
Fluorescenc4 Lifetime Imaging Microscope (FLIM). $350,000
Laser Optical Tweezers. $120,000
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Background
The facility arose from a collaborative effort of faculty from numerous departments and programs, and from the SOM Administration. Most of the equipment was acquired through NIH Shared Instrumentation Grants obtained by the members of the BNAT (Basic Neuroscience Advanced Training) Program, and space and support for the facility were provided by the Dean of the Medical School. The Steering Committee comprises representatives from several contributing departments and programs: Bill Betz, Sasha Sorkin, Nicholas Barry, David Rodman, Angie Ribera, Diego Restrepo, and Bill Sather. Steve Fadul manages the facility.
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Nobody's perfect
The (current) limits of the light microscope
You can acquire images of living cells in real time at high rates, tracking multiple fluorescent probes simultaneously, in three dimensions. With special techniques you can monitor molecular interactions on a sub-millisecond time scale. However...
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...there are limits. The pesky laws of
physics constrain our efforts to provide ideal imaging instruments. For example, because of optical diffraction, when we image an infinitely small spot of light, the best we can
do is this - a disc a few hundred nanometers across, made worse by target-like side bands.
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The size of the Airy disc depends on the wavelength of light. We work only with visible light and its neighbors, which represent a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Can this fundamental physical limit caused by diffraction be overcome? Evidently it can, as described below.
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When will it end?
The revolution in light microscopy began about 1980, and led successively to the laser scanning confocal microscope, the digital deconvolution microscope, the evanescent wave microscope, and the multi-photon microscope, among others.
Each of these microscopes tries to eliminate out-of-focus fluorescence. Even if they did their job perfectly, the distortion due to diffraction would persist unaltered.
Now comes what may be the biggest advance of all: the STED 4Pi Microscope, which addresses this fundamental limitation.
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The STED 4Pi-Microscope attacks diffraction, the basic physical limit to resolution.
Developed by Stefan Hell and colleagues in Goettingen, this instrument increases resolution by five fold or more, in all 3 dimensions.
Soon it may be time to retire the word microscope, and replace it with nanoscope.
(STED means STimulated Emission Deletion. The STED-4Pi can reduce the size of the Airy disc from about 250 nm to about 50 nm, and z-axis blur from about 500 nm to about 50 nm.)
Click for details.
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Facility
