Research, Innovation & Impact

The Andor Dragonfly 602 spinning disk confocal microscope includes 405, 488, 560 and 640 nm lasers coupled to the Borealis illumination system for highly uniform illumination of the imaging area. The instrument is also equipped with a high-sensitivity Andor iXon 888 Life EMCCD camera and a high-speed Sona-6 Extreme sCMOS camera. SRRF-Stream+, a software-based super-resolution technique, can further provide a 2- to 6-fold improvement in resolution, and it is compatible with conventional fluorophores and fluorescent proteins, requiring no special sample preparation. The system is also outfitted with an Okolab microscope enclosure and stage incubator for temperature and CO2 control. The system also comes with Mosaic 3, an optical module for targeted illumination techniques, such as photobleaching (with the 445 nm laser), optogenetics, photoactivation, and uncaging (with an 8 wavelength CoolLED PE800 light source). This cutting-edge instrument is capable of meeting most demanding light microscopy imaging applications such as studies of dynamic processes in living cells, thereby enabling observations of cell migration, development, and intracellular trafficking with high temporal resolution. Research that requires high volume imaging of large, fixed tissue samples will also greatly benefit from the fast acquisition speed of this system.

The following objectives are available for this system: