Digital imaging of developing organisms

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Understanding how an organism develops is a critical step in understanding how an organism functions.  One of the key apsects of understanding animal developmen requires the ability to manuipulate gene or protein expression and then test the effects on embryonic or animal development.  This can be done in a range of ways including the use of genetic mutations or methods that disrupt protein production or change how developmental signaling occurs.  However, no matter the organism to be investigated or the manner of disrupting developmental processes, the ability to visualize the effects on embryonic development is a vital part of this approach.  For these approaches imaging of developing organisms or tissues is required.  The researchers and their laboratories requesting this equipment study different aspects of development.  However they all use similar approaches that make use of antibodies to developmentally regulated  proteins paired with tissue staining to assess changes in protein expression, signaling, cell fate or morphology.  For this high resolution microscopes are an essential part of all developmental biology laboratories.  Many of the developmental defects analyzed are on the scale of single cells or developing tissues and thus high magnification paired with excellent optics and lenses are used.  Paired with the use of these high quality microscopes is the need to capture these images for futher analysis and presentation of the data to others in the field.   This requires a high end digital camera paired with a computer and software to rune the camera that has been requested in this grant applicaiton.  A digital camera has been requested that can capture large amounts of data with high resolution to faithfully represent the data observed through the microscope.  In addition the digital camera requires a computer with the necessary software to run the camera, store the captured data and analyze the generated images.