IF imaging
Science doesn’t stop even when you’re trying to wrap things up for vacation. I’ve been finishing up some immunofluourescence photos so that I can sit back and relax on the beach next week. After doing the experiments and then trying to take the photos the hard, I asked the lab next door if I could use their microscope setup. I have to tell…Man was I impressed.
The system has an olympus camera for the photos but that wasn’t what impressed me the most. What I found truly amazing compared to our system was the imaging software package. Taking the photos is a breeze. The image comes up real time on the computer monitor and you adjust the focus, exposure time and black/white balance and click. The image is then imported into the imaging software, DP Manager.
Now there really isn’t much to manipulate after you take the photos but the nice thing that this software is that it does overlaying. Once you click the option to overlay, you simply toggle back and forth between the photos you want superimposed. You can superimpose your FITC stained photo right on top of your TRITC and your DAPI stain or any combiniation there of. 99% of the time the overlay is perfect but if you should need to move the photo left or right you just put the coordinates in to do that. More importantly, you can increase or decrease the intensity of one photo to match the intensity of the other.
I admit before using this software I was impressed by the photos you see where the nuclear is dapi stained and the cytoplasm is Tritc stained and then there is a third stain. I figured someone spent a lot of time and effort to achieve that photo and they might have. With this imaging system however, almost anyone can do it.
September 15th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
Was your “almost anyone” a not so subtle dig at my (lack of) microscopy skills?