Research & Training

Microscopy Equipment and Software

Equipment

  • Delta Vision Deconvolution Microscope System (Nikon TE-200 Microscope) Lab Technicians
  • Hamamatsu Cooled CCD Video-Camera connected to a Zeiss Axiophot
  • Zeiss LSM 510 Laser Scanning Confocal system on a Zeiss Axioscope 2 Upright Microscope equipped with 4 lasers giving a total of 7 laser lines at 351nm, 364nm, 458nm, 488nm, 514nm, 543nm, and 633nm.
  • IVIS 200 Imaging System from XENOGEN for non-invasive imaging of both bioluminescence and fluorescence in living animals. The instrument is equipped with excitation and emission filters for GFP, DsRed, Cy 5.5, and ICG in addition to a set of four background filters for subtraction of tissue autofluorescence.
  • Nikon TE300 Inverted Fluorescence Microscope equipped with piezo Z stepping motor and a 5 MHz Princeton Instrument CCD camera. The microscope has excitation filters for EGFP, DAPI, FITC, Texas Red/Rhodamine, Cy3, and Cy5, and is equipped with the Metamorph Imaging software for image acquisition, processing and analysis.
  • Nikon E600 Upright microscope equipped with a SPOT RT color camera (from Diagnostic Instruments) for bright-field as well as fluorescence imaging, and SKY Imaging system from Applied Spectral Imaging, for spectral karyotyping
  • Nikon E600 Teaching microscope equipped with a SPOT QE color camera
  • Eppendorf Semi-Automatic Cell Microinjector
    • Dye Sublimation Color Printer
  • Terabyte Storage Server, Tape Drive, DVD/CD Burners Lab Technician
  • Workstations: Silicon Graphics O2, Silicon Graphics Dual-Processor Octanes (2), Silicon Graphics PC, Mac G4, Dell PC, terabyte storage array, tape storage drive, DVD/CD burners, FTP servers.
  • In the CMM-E venue located in the new SOM Microscopy Core along with the Neurosciences Microscopy Core, we can now provide limited access to the Neurosciences equipment, which includes:
    • DeltaVision Spectris (Upgraded to an RT) Deconvolution System
    • 2-Photon Microscope
    • Spectral Deconvolution Confocal Microscope
    • Intra Vital Microscope: IV100
    • Olympus Disk Scanning Confocal

Software

The 3-D rendering software packages from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, such as Mesh Viewer , and Volume Explorer, support interactive viewing of multi-modal, multi-resolution volume data. These in-house packages allows users to interactively view and manipulate large-scale volume data, and generate volume rendered images. Mesh Viewer integrates with the NPACI Scalable Visualization Toolkits to access large-scale volume data. In particular, it uses the Mesh Toolkit to scalably access mesh data. Mesh Viewer interfaces with the VISTA Volume Renderer to generate volume rendered images. Vista is a multi-threaded, platform independent, scalable and robust volume renderer that allows volume rendering of even those datasets that exceed available memory. VISTA also interfaces with Mesh Viewer for generating transfer functions and custom cameras which can be used to view (render) a volume from different positions. This provides VISTA the capability of creating walk-thrus of datasets.

    Other available software packages include Applied Precision SoftWorx, Image Pro Plus from MediaCybernetics, Metamorph from Molecular Devices, SPOT, Co-Localizer Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Image Ready, After Effects & Powerpoint. In the CMM-E venue located in the new SOM Microscopy Core along with the Neurosciences Microscopy Core ( http://microscopy.ucsd.edu), we can provide access to Slide Book from Intelligent Imaging Innovations, Imaris from Bitplane, and other powerful packages.