We’re delighted to announce that both of our new microscope systems, provided by Cairn, have been installed. Cairn have been extremely helpful in assisting us with the design, setup and installation of these systems, a big thank you to all at the company who helped us.

Our first system constitutes an older microscope stand, a modified Zeiss Axiovert 35, retrofitted into a dual excitation and dual emission system for ratiometric imaging of Ca2+, Zn2+, pH probes etc. This microscope is fitted with dual Cairn Optospin IV filters wheels, a Hamamatsu Orca-Flash4.0 sCMOS high speed camera, an X-cite 120 PCQ HXP lamp, all Zeiss Fluar lenses and Molecular Devices MetaFluor for ratiometric image acquisition and analysis.

The second system is a Leica TCS SPE confocal which has now been fitted with an additional Retiga R1 CCD camera and a Jena Mipos 500 Piezo unit for collecting Z stacks. This unit is controlled with Micro Manager.

Both microscopes have been setup in our dedicated imaging lab, where we already have two working systems (Zeiss Colibri LED Ca2+ imaging system and Leica DM2500 system for immunohistochemistry). All four micro-scopes are now ready for use.

Many thanks to Joao from Cairn for setting up these systems and for the training. Further thanks to the School of Biosciences (Cardiff University) for a £10k grant to assist with purchasing the ratiometric imaging system.