Translational Photonic Fingerprinting- STELLARIS FALCON FLIM CONFOCAL

在爱丁堡BioQuarter工作的研究人员严重依赖于共聚焦高级光学显微镜（CALM）设施集中提供的成像设备。现有的clsm已有11年的历史，已经开始失效，在经济上是不可持续的。这对许多研究者正在进行的成像工作产生了负面影响。该平台急需更换，并同时升级为激发光源，可在宽波长范围内调谐，并具有荧光寿命测量（FLIM）能力。这两种功能在校园中都不具备，但现在对于光学分子成像平台的发展至关重要。光学成像探针目前正在开发用于临床应用的光纤平台，用于临床实验研究中的分子表征和病理和生理过程的“指纹”。这套技术现在已经为翻译开发做好了准备，但一个主要障碍是缺乏合适的CLSM平台，以便在人体内翻译之前筛选、评估和优化成像参数。在校园和更广泛的大学以及学术和工业合作伙伴中，FLIM是一项新兴的核心技术，可以帮助发现细胞和组织中的关键途径。该平台对于充分利用爱丁堡的跨学科研究至关重要，该研究得到了大规模项目的支持，这些项目正在深入了解炎症和宿主-病原体相互作用的关键过程。

Researchers working at Edinburgh BioQuarter are heavily dependent on the imaging equipment centrally provided by the Confocal Advanced Light Microscopy (CALM) Facility. The existing CLSMs which are now 11 years old, have started to fail and are economically unsustainable. This has negatively impacted on the ongoing imaging work of many investigators. This platform needs to be urgently replaced and concurrently upgraded with an excitation light source, tuneable over a wide range of wavelengths, and fluorescence lifetime measurement (FLIM) capacity. Both of these capabilities are not available on the Campus, but are now essential for progressing optical molecular imaging platforms. Optical imaging probes are now being developed for clinical use with fibre-optic platforms for molecular characterisation and "fingerprinting" of pathological and physiological processes in clinical experimental studies. This suite of technology is now primed for translational development but a major obstacle is the lack of a suitable CLSM platform to enable screening, assessment and optimisation of imaging parameters prior to in-human translation.Across both the campus and the wider university and academic and industrial collaborators , FLIM is an emerging and core technology to help discover key pathways in cells and tissues.The platform is essential to fully exploit interdisciplinary research in Edinburgh supported by large scale programmes which are gaining insight into key processes in inflammation and host-pathogen interactions.