The development of advanced microscopy techniques is a driving force behind advances in biological research and medical imaging. The refinement and commercialization of laser scanning confocal microscopes, nanoscopes and other types of imaging instruments along with advances in fluorophore development have led to a revolution in biological microscopy (Buckers et al., 2011;Wang et al.,2011;Reck-Peterson et al., 2010). The newest imaging methods, however, often require expertise and instruments beyond the financial and technical capacities of most individual scientists. Thus, shared imaging facilities are crucial components of university research cores. The ICAC is the only shared imaging facility within Tufts Medical School and Tufts Medical center. It was developed in response to the rapid ad vances occurring in contemporary biological microscopy and to meet the imaging priorities of Tufts neuroscience investigators. The ICAC has provided Tufts neuroscientists with a broad range of microscopic imaging services including wide-field fluorescence microscopy &digital imaging, confocal microscopy, 2-photon microscopy, Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, electron microscopy (EM), live-cell imaging, and laser capture microdissection. Equipment is available for standard microscopy as well as dynamic imaging such as fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) or fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) experiments. The ICAC has been heavily used since its inception;it was used by 39-46 labs and 62-70 individuals during every year of this funding cycle. Thirty one neuroscience labs including 9 NINDS-funded labs employed ICAC facilities during this cycle. Given the heavy core usage, we recently added a second confocal microscope and a TIRF microscope to the facility using supplemental funds from NINDS and a shared instrumentation grant from NCRR (see Section B5
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