Advanced Imaging Facility

The Advanced Imaging Lab is part of the Imaging and Cytometry Unit (UIC), at the Gulbenkian Science Institute, Oeiras, Portugal. It is an advanced light microscopy facility that focuses on the imaging of biological events at the cellular/molecular level of fixed or living cells or tissue.

Though the laboratory's aim is to provide researchers at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia with microscopy instrumentation and services, we also offer the same services to outside groups or companies. Charges may be applied in these cases.

Equipment

The Advanced Imaging Lab currently has a few microscopes divided in three categories.

• Stereoscopes: If your samples are not on the small size, you need an overview of your organism, have a plate with fluorescent signals or just need to dissect with fluorescence we have a decent selection of options at the UIC.
  • Zeiss' Stereo Lumar
  • Hamamatsu Aequoria
• Brightfield and Widefield Fluorescence Microscopes: A wide-field fluorescence microscope uses a lamp, e.g. a Mercury arc lamp, to illuminate and excite the specimen. This is a fast and economical way to obtain fluorescent images, which can be viewed directly with your eyes through the ocular or captured with a camera. Thin specimens that do not require confocal imaging might be better analyzed using a conventional widefield microscope as it offers unsurpassed signal to noise.
  • Deltavision
  • Leica DMRA2
  • Leica DMLB2
  • Nikon E400
  • Screening Microscope
• Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope: Confocal microscopy offers several advantages over conventional widefield optical microscopy, including the ability to control depth of field, elimination or reduction of background information away from the focal plane (that leads to image degradation), and the capability to collect serial optical sections from thick specimens.
  • Leica SP5 Inverted
  • Leica SP5 Hyd Upright
  • Zeiss META
  • Andor Spinning disk
  • Lightseet Microscope
  • Multi-photon Microscope