COBRE: UND: AUGMENTATION OF IMAGING CORE FACILITY

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The objectives here are to augment existing imaging core facilities in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and to enhance imaging capacity and capabilities at the University of North Dakota. The existing imaging core is equipped with an Hitachi TEM, an Hitachi SEM, an Olympus Fluoview 300 laser scanning confocal microscope, and two older model epifluorescence microscopes, one of which is equipped with a Spot II digital camera. While the electron microscopy facilities are state-of-the-art, the confocal and the fluorescence microscopy facilities had several limitations. First, the confocal microscope is equipped with only two channels and possesses a laser configuration which does not permit the use of dyes excited by near UV. The system is not upgradable and therefore investigators are effectively limited to dual label imaging with a restricted list of fluorophores. Second, the existing epifluorescence microscopes are inadequate for most immunofluorescence microscopy applications due to their older optical design. To overcome these limitations and to meet the needs of Projects 1, 3, and 5, the imaging core was augmented by the addition of 1) a Zeiss 510 Meta confocal microscope capable of eight channel imaging (seven fluorescent channels/one DIC channel) and detecting a wide range of fluorophores, 2) a confoCor2 FCS unit for fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, 3) an Axiovert200 microscope with a sensitive, fast digital camera (AxioCam HRM), and 4) a computer workstation with Zeiss software for processing and analyzing image data. These resources were required for three of the projects in the COBRE application. Their addition greatly enhances the research capabilities of investigators in the School of Medicine and the University of North Dakota.