How to Acknowledge the Core in Your Paper
Formal acknowledgements demonstrate the impact of the LMC and strengthen future funding proposals. If your publication includes data acquired at the facility, please:
- Send a reprint of the paper to facility staff.
Include the following acknowledgement text:
This study was made possible in part through access to the MCB Light Microscopy Core Facility, the NIH grant S10OD026702 that allowed funding of the Zeiss 980 LSM or the NIH grant 1S10OD036332 that allowed funding of the Lumicks C-Trap and training and support by Thomas Wilkop.
Please acknowledge the respective NIH grant depending on the instrument used in your studies.
Facilities Statement for Grant Proposals
If you need to include information about the core and its services in your grant proposal, please refer to the following text:
The MCB Light Microscopy Core (LMC) provides the research community with access to state-of-the-art imaging tools and expert support to maximize research efficiency and impact. The core is uniquely positioned to collect low light fluorescent images with high temporal and spatial resolution of both living and fixed organisms, allowing for high-throughput image collection.
The core, through the PhD-level expert technical director trained in optics and physics with 20 years of experience in the microscopy and imaging field, provides training for students and scholars to obtain the best data quality, supports identifying the most appropriate instrument for the project, provides guidance on experimental design and assists in troubleshooting and post-collection image processing.
The LMC currently operates across several locations with a total footprint of 1600 sqft and supports 7 high end instruments and various auxiliary resources:
Zeiss LSM 980: A laser scanning confocal microscope that can image fixed and live specimens at high speeds. It has a light-efficient beam path with up to 36 simultaneous channels and high spectral flexibility. The LSM 980's fast multiplexed Airyscan 2 detector allows super-resolution imaging at 8x faster speed.
Nikon N-SIM: A structured illumination microscope that affords a spatial resolution between 95 and 110 nm laterally for fixed samples.
Nikon HTS: Spinning disc confocal microscope/ widefield microscope allowing high energy photo stimulation at 405 nm, facilitating imaging at frame rates of up to 100 Hz in confocal and 1000 Hz in widefield mode over a 25 mm field of view.
Lumicks C-Trap: An instrument that allows simultaneous manipulation and visualization of single-molecule interactions in real-time. It combines high-resolution optical tweezers, fluorescence, and label-free microscopy, and an advanced microfluidics system in a truly integrated and correlated format.
DeltaVision Ultra: A high-resolution widefield deconvolution microscope optimized for imaging and analysis of cellular and subcellular processes, up to 50 μm beyond the coverslip and down to 250 nm in size. It is designed for extreme sensitivity in widefield fluorescence imaging and is easy to master.
3i Lattice Light Sheet Microscope: An extremely gentle microscope that generates an optical lattice to create an ultra-thin light sheet to image biological samples over long periods of time and with very fine resolution. This allows for 4D live cell imaging, where experiments limited to seconds or minutes on other imaging platforms can be extended to hours or even days.
CrestOptics X-Light DeepSIM/V3: Versatile, live cell imaging suitable, combining spinning disc confocal with structured illumination imaging covering the entire optical spectrum with 7 laser lines. It combines one of the highest acquisition speeds, with up to 1000 Hz across a 25 mm field of view in confocal mode.
SVI Huygens 23: Image processing software to perform image deconvolution and restoration, interactive analysis and volume visualization in 2D-4D.
Imaris 10.2: An interactive image analysis software for 3D and time-lapse microscopic images with advanced solutions for big datasets (Terabyte range) - smart Volume and Surface rendering based on multi-resolution technologies, plus Surface calculations for images of unlimited size. The operation on a dedicated state-of-the-art workstation allows rapid and complex AI based image analysis.
40 TB Synology data storage server: Dedicated network storage interfaced to the instruments through 100 Gigabyte Ethernet to ensure data security and seamless image analysis.