Nordic Microscopy Symposium – 3rd-5th October

We are delighted to invite you to the Nordic microscopy symposium at the Live Cell Imaging core facility, Nikon Centre of Excellence at Karolinska Institutet, organised by BergmanLabora, Ramcon Denmark and Inter Instrument AS.

  • The symposium will highlight the great research done in the Nordics where microscopy is a key tool.
  • New exciting equipment from Nikon will be showcased including the AX/NSPARC super-resolution point confocal and the CrEST DeepSIM super-resolution spinning disk confocal.
  • We will also be launching the new Nikon Eclipse Ji benchtop assay instrument and demo the simpler CrEST Cicero spinning disk confocal.
  • The capability of these systems will be demonstrated during public sessions (3rd of October) and in private sessions (on 4th and 5th October) where you are welcome to bring your own samples.

Venue: Neo, Flemingsberg Campus, Karolinska Institute: Erna Möller Lecture hall (Symposium), Live Cell Imaging (LCI) core facility (Demos)

3rd October

    • 1000-1145       Public demo: Nikon AX R NSPARC super-resolution point-scanning confocal, CrEST X-Light V3 super-resolution spinning disk confocal, CrEST Cicero compact spinning disk
    • 1000-1145       Open house at the Live Cell Imaging core facility (Drop in. Contact Sylvie Le Guyader)
    • 1200-1300       Lunch (requires pre-registration)
    • 1300-1305       Welcome
    • 1305-1345       Zuzana Kadlecova (Cambridge Institute for Medical Research – UK): Lights! Camera! Uptake! Zooming in on Endocytosis with Quantitative TIRF-SIM Analysis.
    • 1345-1410       Nicoline Dorothea Daugaard (Dept. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, SDU – Denmark): Tracking T cells and their interactions with cancer cells in 3D using NIS-Elements General Analysis (GA3)
    • 1410-1440       LCI short talks:
      • Chiara Annunziata (Karolinska Institute – Sweden): A pipeline for the multiparametric assessment of the anti ageing effects of candidate molecules
      • Andrea Coschiera (Karolinska Institute – Sweden): Primary cilia promote the differentiation of human neurons through the WNT signaling pathway
      • Natalie Geyer (Karolinska Institute – Sweden): Multiplex RNA in situ hybridisation for liver parenchyma characterization in a metastatic context
    • 1440-1500       Coffee
    • 1500-1525       Technical talk (Nikon): Microscopy Simplified, Nordic Launch of Nikon’s new ECLIPSE Ji
    • 1525-1540       Staffan Strömblad (Karolinska Institute – Sweden): Multi-site assessment of reproducibility in high-content cell migration imaging data
    • 1540-1605       Pieta Mattila (University of Turku – Finland): Advanced imaging methods to visualize lymphocyte activation

4th and 5th October

Registration is mandatory and can be done via the following site: Nordic Microscopy Symposium – BergmanLabora.

Please share this event with friends and colleagues who may also be interested in attending.

Clearing and expansion microscopy symposium and workshop sept 12-14

Two really nice symposia/workshop on clearing and expansion microscopy next week!

The need to improve microscopy trainings

The LCI facility has just published an article about  ‘Improving light microscopy training routines with evidence-based education’. The article is now available in the Journal of Microscopy. We hope that this article will give useful tips to better design users’ training and improve their learning outcome. 🙂

Here is the abstract:

The low reproducibility of scientific data published in articles has recently become a cause of concern in many scientific fields. Data involving light microscopy is no exception. The low awareness of researchers of the technologies they use in their research has been identified as one of the main causes of the problem. Potential solutions have hinted at the need to improve technological and methodological education within research.

Despite the pivotal role of microscopy core facilities in the education of researchers being well documented, facility staff (FS) often learn their trade on the job, without receiving themselves any structured education about the technology they teach others to use. Additionally, despite endorsing an important role at the highest level of education, most FS never receive any training in pedagogy, the field of research on teaching and learning methods.

In this article, we argue that the low level of awareness that researchers have of microscopy stems from a knowledge gap formed between them and microscopy FS during training routines. On the one hand, FS consider that their teaching task is to explain what is needed to produce reliable data. On the other, despite understanding what is being taught, researchers fail to learn the most challenging aspects of microscopy, those involving their judgement and reasoning. We suggest that the misunderstanding between FS and researchers is due to FS not being educated in pedagogy and thus often confusing understanding and learning.

To bridge this knowledge gap and improve the quality of the microscopy education available to researchers, we propose a paradigm shift where training staff at technological core facilities be acknowledged as full-fledged teachers and offered structured education not only in the technology they teach but also in pedagogy. We then suggest that training routines at facilities be upgraded to follow the principles of the Constructive Alignment pedagogical method. We give an example of how this can be applied to existing microscopy training routines. We also describe a model to define where the responsibility of FS in training researchers begins and ends.

This involves a major structural change where university staff involved in teaching research technologies themselves receive appropriate education. For this to be achieved, we advocate that funding agencies, universities, microscopy and core facility organisations mobilise resources of time and funding. Such changes may involve funding the creation and development of ‘Train-the-trainer’ type of courses and giving incentives for FS to upgrade their technological and pedagogical knowledge, for example by including them in career paths. We believe that this paradigm shift is necessary to improve the level of microscopy education and ultimately the reproducibility of published data.

Nordic microscopy symposium – Save the date!

Please join the Nordic microscopy symposium on the 3rd of October at the Live Cell Imaging core facility, Nikon Centre of Excellence at Karolinska Institutet. The symposium is organised by BergmanLabora, Ramcon Denmark and Inter Instrument AS. Please save the date.

The event will highlight Nordic research where light microscopy is a key tool.

Several Nikon fast super resolution systems will also be available: Nikon AX confocal with NSPARC and Nikon/CrEST V3 spinning disk with DeepSIM.

Before and after the symposium, the capability of these systems will be demonstrated during public sessions (on the 3rd of October) and in private sessions (booking required) where you are welcome to bring your own samples.

Preliminary schedule:

Tuesday 3rd October

1000-1045     AX R NSPARC + CrEST V3 with DeepSIM public demonstration (in parallel)

1100-1145        AX R NSPARC + CrEST V3 with DeepSIM public demonstration (in parallel)

1200-1300     Lunch (requires pre-registration)

1300-1305     Welcome

1305-1345      *Keynote: TBC

1345-1410       *Nicoline Dorothea Daugaard (Dept. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, SDU – Denmark):

Tracking T cells and their interactions with cancer cells in 3D using NIS-Elements General Analysis (GA3)

1410-1440       *LCI short talks:

Chiara Annunziata (Karolinska Institutet – Sweden)

Andrea Coschiera (Karolinska Institutet – Sweden)

Natalie Geyer (Karolinska Institutet – Sweden)

1440-1500     Coffee

1500-1525      *Super resolution system overview (Nikon): Title TBC

1525-1540      *Staffan Strömblad (Karolinska Institutet – Sweden): Multi-site assessment of reproducibility in high-content cell migration imaging data

1540-1615       *Pieta Mattila (University of Turku – Finland): Title TBC

Wednesday 4th October

0830-1400    AX R NSPARC + CrEST V3 with DeepSIM private demonstrations (bring your own sample)

Thursday 5th October

0830-1400    AX R NSPARC + CrEST V3 with DeepSIM private demonstrations (bring your own sample)

Venue (symposium): Erna Möller Lecture hall, Neo, Flemingsberg Campus, Karolinska Institutet

Venue (system demonstrations): Live Cell Imaging core facility, Neo, Flemingsberg Campus, Karolinska Institutet

Please share this event with colleagues who may be interested in attending.

Cool stuff one can do with the LCI Primo

At the LCI core facility, you can use a machine called Primo to micropattern/print proteins at the bottom of a microscopy dish and enable real time imaging of cell-protein interactions.

Now we learnt that we can even micropattern lipids and antibodies on microscopy dishes to image how cells interact with these molecules! This can be done with any pattern and even in multiwell plates! 🙂

Lipid micropatterning: Here is a cool paper showing how filopodia interact with sourrounding lipids and proteins. They image with Structured Illumination and TIRF, techniques that are also on offer at our facility. 🙂

Antibody micropatterning: A new way to analyse extracellular vesicles with multiplexed detection of proteins and RNAs at single EV resolution.

The power of Deep Neural networks

I am wowed at the images published recently in BioArxiv in the Zero-shot deconvolution networks paper. It will be interesting to see the peer-reviewed paper.

I would be interested in visualizing the amount of errors made by the network. A simple way to do it is to acquire a short time lapse (eg 10 images) of a fixed sample, run it through the network and see which structures are stably identified and which change from frame to frame. 🙂

 

Live broadcast of all public lectures the LCI microscopy course

Microscopy course: improve your imaging skills – from sample preparation to image analysis

Starting from next week, the Live Cell Imaging core facility at KI will run its yearly microscopy course.

All the course lectures will be broadcasted live on Zoom, free of charge and there is no need to register. On this page, you can find the course schedule (public activities are in blue) and the  Zoom link to join. Scroll down to read the student testimonies! 😊

30 Jan – 17 Feb 2023

The aim for this course is to improve the microscopy skills of students and researchers who have already used a microscope to acquire digital images of fluorescent samples but feel that more knowledge could help them.

The course covers the following topics:

  • Optics, image formation
  • Fluorescence, fluorophores
  • Bleedthrough
  • Anatomy of a microscope
  • Objectives and refraction index
  • Cameras and detectors
  • Noise and background, Bit depth and saturation
  • Multichannel imaging and spectral unmixing
  • Resolution and contrast
  • Sample preparation, Immunostaining
  • Nyquist sampling
  • Confocal and wide field settings
  • Speed, High throughput/content
  • Volume imaging, deconvolution
  • Clearing and expansion
  • Live cell imaging
  • Fourier
  • AI, Super Resolution microscopy
  • Colocalization
  • Data handling, OMERO.figure

Hope you enjoy the Live Cell Imaging core facility microscopy course! 😃

Registration to the LCI microscopy course 2023 closes on Monday!

It is time to enroll to the yearly light microscopy course run by the Live Cell imaging core facility (30 Jan – 17 Feb 2023): Microscopy: improve your imaging skills – from sample preparation to image analysis’ (6 credits).

  • Check the course schedule to see the course content and testimonies from alumni
  • If interested, you can enrol as a studentPlease read carefully the eligibility criteria and note that the last registration date is the 15th of November.

Additionally, all the lectures (in blue on the schedule) will be publicly broadcasted live on Zoom and accessible to anyone without registration. Even if you do not want to enrol as a student, you can have a look at the and listen to any lecture that triggers your interest. There is no need to register. The schedule and zoom link are on the course page.

The purpose of this course is to enable PhD students and researchers who have already and recently used a microscope to acquire images of fluorescent samples, to improve their microscopy skills.
The course is NOT aimed at training people to use the LCI facility microscopes. The focus is instead on providing the students with enough theoretical and practical knowledge about their OWN sample and their OWN microscope, to enable them to:

1) prepare their sample and formulate their scientific question in a way that is suitable for data extraction from fluorescence images

2) properly use the hardware available in their lab/facility and 3) fully understand each parameter they need to set in the software in their lab/facility.

The aim is to provide the course students with the tools to acquire on ANY wide field, confocal or light sheet microscope, images of their samples that reliably answer their scientific question.

Please help us spread the word. 😃

Light-seq: Multiplexed, non-destructive spatial transcriptomics of tissues sections using light

Light-Seq is a new pretty cool technique for highly multiplexed sequencing of RNA in tissue sections using light. This technique is highly sensitive, highly spatially resolved and because it does not destroy the tissue, it can be combined with protein labelling (genetic or by immunolabelling).

On one of our single-point confocal/spinning disk/widefield system at the LCI facility, we have a device called Primo (DMD + UV laser) which can be used to run this technique! 🙂

Let us know if you would like to set up LightSeq at the LCI core facility!

Live demo of the Nikon Mizar TILT light sheet

On the 22nd of September at 10, you get a chance to see and try the latest light sheet on the market: the Nikon Mizar TILT.

    • Easy to use stage top light sheet with only 1 objective
    • Imaging of cell monolayer, cells in gels, organoids in gels, small organisms…
    • Samples in glass bottom multiwell chamber slides
    • Stage top incubator for live sample imaging
    • Advantage of using the TILT light sheet
      • low phototoxicity and bleaching even with high resolution objective
      • excellent temporal and spatial resolution for live samples
    • See here for more info.

This demo is only for a limited time (10 days) and in person only. Please let us know if you want to join the demo and if you want to try your own sample.

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