Imaging System for Cellular and Molecular Toxicology

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The role of intracellular signalling pathways in cell-cell interactions in toxicology has led to significant new findings regarding the mechanisms by which environmental toxicants can cause deleterious effects on various physiological systems. The current application is to update our image analysis system which is almost 14 years old and has become unserviceable and unreliable for the long-term. We propose to acquire a versatile image analysis system that can be used for measuring fluorescence and chemiluminescence in addition to UV and epi-white light. Fluorescent imaging and chemiluminescence using a sensitive CCD camera offers many advantages in terms of sensitivity and linearity over several orders of magnitude, as well as lower costs, as compared to streptavidin and chemiluminescence or radioactivity with x-ray films. More importantly, it will provide a highly sensitive and reliable imaging system for analyzing western blots, in-cell westerns, electrophoretic mobility shift assays, DNA laddering for apoptosis and documenting Coomassie blue stained gels.