Image – The Live Cell Imaging facility

mCherry-XL: brigther, more stable and with better spectra!

mCherry is a very popular red fluorescent protein. However it has several disadvantages:

It is shifted towards far red (ex peak 585 nm) so it often is not imaged optimally with the illumination sources and filters commonly available.
It bleaches fast

mCherry has now been evolved into mCherry-XL with several improvements:

This variant is shifted back towards green (ex peak 560 nm) therefore being very well excited with popular 561nm lasers.
It is 3 times brighter than mCherry
There is also a clear improvement in the lifetime for FLIM
Together the 2 points above means that less excitation power is required so it should help with the bleaching problem

Here is the paper. Therefore you should consider mCherry-XL for your future tagging with red fluorescence proteins.

Nikon Europe recruits an image analyst

Nikon Europe recruits an image analyst in Leiden.

See here if this is the dream job for you. 🙂

BII webinar about a great tool! TissUUmaps

The BioImage Informatics facility at Scilife organizes a new presentation on free and open-source tools: TissUUmaps, a browser-based tool for GPU-accelerated visualization and interactive exploration of millions of datapoints overlaying tissue samples.

Users can visualize markers and regions, explore spatial statistics and quantitative analyses of tissue morphology, and assess the quality of decoding in situ transcriptomics data. TissUUmaps provides instant multi-resolution image viewing, can be customized, shared, and also integrated in Jupyter Notebooks. TissUUmaps was created in collaboration between BIIF and the Wählby lab. You can read more about it and test the software on its web page: https://tissuumaps.github.io/
During the seminar, we will go through basic usage of TissUUmaps: installation, loading images, markers and regions, change visualization settings, and how to load / save / share projects. The webinar will be given by Christophe Avenel and will take place on March 3rd, 09:00-10:00 (instead of our normal Call4Help session). There will be time for questions and discussion, so we hope this event to be very interactive. Please register here.

Super resolution STED event at Scilife in March

Nordic superresolution microscopy facility staff/researchers: STED

March 15th and 16th at 9-12 am. CONTACT: Hans Blom (hblom@kth.se)

Mar 15, 2022 9:00am

9:00-9:45am – BNMI info / STED intro [Hans Blom & Daniel Smeets (Leica)]
9:45-10:15am – STED sample prepping [Ulf Schwarz et al. (Leica)]
Break
10:30-11:00am – Input from a Nordic STED facility [Jonathan R. Brewer (DaMBIC)]
11:00-11:45am – STED demos [Luis Alvarez/Ulf Schwarz et al. (Leica)]
11:45-12:00am – Extra discussion time

https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69376340781

Mar 16, 2022 9:00am

9:00-9:45am – Live-cell STED [Giovanna Coceano (KTH Stockholm)]
9:45-10:15am – Remote STED [Marko Lampe (ALMF/EMBL)]
Break
10:30-11:00am – STED-FCS [Erdinc Sezgin (KI Stockholm)]
11:00-11:45am – Advanced STED demos [Luis Alvarez/Ulf Schwarz et al. (Leica)]
11:45-12:00am – Extra discussion time

https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/67902191893

Listen to the lectures at the LCI facility microscopy course!

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

All the course lectures and some workshops will broadcasted live on Zoom, free of charge and there is no need to register.

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

Date: 24 Jan – 11 Feb 2022

Target audience:

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

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! 😊

Hope you enjoy the Live Cell Imaging core facility microscopy course 2022! 😃

The Live Cell Imaging facility is Nikon Center of Excellence – Symposium and open house – tomorrow 10/11

Tomorrow, we will celebrate us being Nikon Center of Excellence with great microscopy talks, a live demo of the latest Nikon Ax confocal and guided tours of the LCI facility!

Join us IRL if you have registered or follow the talks on Zoom with this link (scientific program below).

You can also join us physically from 13:50 onwards for the Ax demo or the guided tour. Remember to book a time slot on the paper in front of the Erna Möller seminar hall in Neo.

9:00 – 9:05 Welcome (Staffan Strömblad)
9:05 – 9:15 Sylvie Le Guyader
Presentation of the Live Cell Imaging Core Facility
9:15 – 9:45 Christophe Leterrier, CNRS-Aix Marseille University, France
Looking at neurons at the nanoscale with super-resolution microscopy
9:45 – 09:50 Dusan Popov, European Product Manager Super Resolution, Nikon Europe B.V.
Future of superresolution imaging
9:50 – 10:05 Jianjiang Hu, Karolinska Institutet
Local temporal Rac1-GTP nadirs and peaks restrict cell protrusions and retractions
10:50 – 11:20 Joakim Lundeberg, The Royal Technology Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
Exploration of the transcriptome and genome in a tissue context
11:20 – 11:50 Guillaume Jacquemet, Åbo Akademi, Finland
Democratizing deep learning microscopy image analysis (ZeroCostDL4Mic)
11:50 – 11:55 Simone Lepper, European Product Manager Imaging Software & High- Content Screening, Nikon Europe B.V.
Future of Image Analysis
13:00 – 13:50 Featured presentation: Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Senior Group Leader, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Research Campus, USA
Emerging Imaging Technologies to Study Cell Architecture, Dynamics, and Function
13:50 –16:00 Open house at the Live Cell Imaging Core Facility / Tours / Demos

The LCI microscopy course 2022 is now open for registrations!

It is now time to apply to the intensive LCI microscopy course Jan/Feb 2022: Microscopy: improve your imaging skills – from sample preparation to image analysis

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 their knowledge is limited.

All the lectures at the LCI microscopy course will also broadcasted live online, free of charge and there is no need to register.

All details about the course including course schedule, how to apply, and how to follow the lectures are found here.

Scroll down to read the kind testimonies of our dear students! 😊

Hope you enjoy the LCI facility microscopy course 2022!

Brighter secondary antibodies

Fluorophores are in constant development.

There is now a new generation of Alexa Fluor fluorophores: the Alexa Fluor Plus. They can be purchased already coupled to secondary antibodies on the ThermoFisher website.

Brilliant violet antibodies are also very bright and despite their name, they come in all colours. The can be purchased from Biolegend which produces the fluorophore.

Another excellent source of bright fluorophores is the Janelia Fluor dyes. They can be purchased coupled to antibodies from the NovusBio website.

Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz excellent talk on November 8th

Scilifelab invited Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz to give a talk IRL in Solna on November 8th. Jennifer works a lot with microscopy and is an excellent speaker so her talk is guaranteed to be inspiring!

Here is more info.