NMI - upgrade of microscopes

NMI is a distributed national infrastructure for microscopy in life sciences with nodes located at KTH, and Stockholm, Gothenburg, Umeå and Uppsala Universities.

The aim of NMI is to provide access to state-of the-art equipment and expertise in microscopy and image analysis.Technologies available at NMI include: correlative microscopy, multimodal microscopy, intravital microscopy, multiplex high-content microscopy and super-resolution microscopy.

The techniques are used for fundamental and translational research to image at molecular to cellular resolutions in single cells to whole organisms.

Those advanced imaging techniques require both specialized equipment and expert scientific staff.In this proposal NMI ask to upgrade two super resolution microscopes at KTH and GU to state-of-the-art and to upgrade the intra-vital imaging capacity at SU.The present super-resolution microscopes in NMI are of the first generation, introduced in 2010.

They have reached their economical, technical and scientific lifetime.

To answer to the requests from users for state-of-the-art equipment and scientific support we need to upgrade those microscopes with the latest developments.

This gives new functionality with significantly higher performance in both temporal and spatial resolution and also access to live cell super-resolution imaging, a technique many users have expressed a strong interest for.A small animal fluorescence and luminescence imaging system, IVIS, enhance the capacity for intra-vital imaging.

The system allows pre-screening animals prior to preparation with window implementation and high-resolution intra vital imaging.

Thereby we can improve the use of each animal specimen according to the 3R (Replace, Reduce, Refine) principle.Since start in 2016, NMI has supported more than 1100 research projects from 760 users with imaging and analysis. NMI is thus established as national infrastructure of importance for current and future Swedish research.