Facility Details

The Nikon Imaging Center at UCSF is equipped with several advanced microscopes. We have two super-resolution microscopes, three confocal microscopes, and three widefield systems. One of our super-resolution systems is a Nikon N-STORM microscope which is capable of PALM, STORM, and other variants of single molecule switching and localization microscopy. It is capable of 3-color imaging with up to 20 nm resolution in XY and 50 nm resolution in Z. This system is also capable of high-speed TIRF microscopy with frame rates > 100fps. The other super-resolution system is a Nikon N-SIM structured illumination microscope, which can produce images with ~100 nm resolution in XY and 350 nm in Z. This microscope can acquire four color images and can acquire a super-resolution image in ~2 seconds, so it can be used for live cell imaging.
Our confocal microscopes include a Nikon C1si laser-scanning confocal, capable of 3-color imaging and spectral imaging, and two 4-color spinning disk confocals optimized for video rate data acquisition from live cells. One of the spinning disk confocals is a CSU-W1 equipped with an sCMOS camera for imaging of large fields of view; the other is a CSU-22 with an EMCCD for imaging dim samples. One of our widefield microscopes is optimized for multi-day time-lapse imaging of live cells and one is optimized for five-color imaging (DAPI / FITC / Cy3 / Cy5 / Cy7). Our third widefield microscope is optimized for high speed multicolor Z-stack acquisition. This high speed microscope uses an Andor Zyla camera and is capable of acquiring 5.5 megapixel images at 100 fps, and can acquire multicolor and Z-stack images at this frame rate. This camera can also acquire smaller fields of view at higher frame rates (>1000 fps). It can also rapidly acquire large fields of view by image stitching and acquire data from multiwell plates rapidly. It is also equipped with photoactivation and photobleaching lasers for FRAP and photoactivation experiments. We also have color (RGB) image acquisition capabilities.
We have also developed a light sheet “Ultramicroscope” that allows imaging of cleared tissue samples up to 2 cm on a side, and has 1x, 2x, and 5x objectives, along with an 8x optical zoom system, allowing imaging resolutions from 20 m to 0.5m. Illumination is provided by a four line laser launch, with 405 nm, 488 nm, 561 nm, and 640 nm excitation. We have successfully imaged a number of cleared tissues with this microscope, including cleared mouse embryos, brains, spinal cords, and bone.
We have a full suite of image analysis tools available for data analysis, including Nikon Elements, Metamorph, Huygens, ImageJ/Fiji, Cellprofiler, and Matlab, and high power workstations (up to 8 cores, 128 GB RAM) for data analysis.