The University of Calgary intends to purchase a microscope suite comprised of three (3) imaging systems including a widefield fluorescence microscope, an incubating plate-imaging microscope and confocal microscope from Evident Canada.
These systems will be added to existing systems for continuous workflow in the Live Cell Imaging (LCI), Snyder Institute core facility where a seamless workflow is required moving between experiments and devices. The three systems must integrate with existing Evident instruments without the need for additional components, utilizing the same software platform (Olympus cellSens), primary optics (objective lenses) that are interchangeable between systems and must be able to support existing Olympus objective lenses that are currently available in LCI. Continuity of software with existing and these three systems must be based on a common platform to ensure data analysis and data portability between all platforms. Continuity is required to ensure consistent, reliable, and publishable research results. Additionally, standard operating procedures and pipelines for acquisition, processing, and analysis have been established over the past years on existing Evident systems. Switching to new platform and creating new processes would require additional time, resources and delay research. The overarching continuity of hardware and software allows for efficiency and maintaining reproducible workflows.
In addition to consistency and compatibility, to the research team’s knowledge, these systems have specific unique technical capabilities that are suited for research involving organoid imaging at multiple scales of organization, and at different developmental time points ranging from minutes to days. The main focus is live organoids, clusters of organoids, and sub-cellular and inter-cellular details (interactions) between organoids.
