Funds are requested for the purchase of an Olympus Fluoview FV500 confocal laser scanning microscope, which will be integrated into the UCSB Shared Microscopy Facility. This established facility has been providing core microscopic equipment and technical support to UCSB investigators for over 15 years. The proposed confocal microscope will perpetuate the commitment of the Shared Microscopy Facility to provide state-of-the art tools for the UCSB research community. The instrument requested will replace a seven-year-old BioRad 1024 microscope that is now seriously limited by poor reliability, decreasing repairability, and lack of potential for upgrade. The new microscope will have increased capabilities in terms of the number of available laser excitation wavelengths, the capacity for quantitative analyses, and the imaging of living cells. In addition, the new instrument affords advantages in terms of improved computational hardware and software for laser control and image capture, superior resolution, and larger field of view capabilities. The eleven principal investigators sponsoring this proposal represent five different academic departments or research units including the Neuroscience Research Institute, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Department of Psychology, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the Interdepartmental Program in Biomolecular Sciences and Engineering. Each has current NIH-supported research projects in which confocal microscopy is a critical investigational component. These investigations focus upon biomedical issues, including neuronal degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, ocular pathologies such as age-related macular degeneration and retina] detachment, cancer biology and pharmacology, cell and molecular biology of infectious disease, as well as neuronal physiology and development. The confocal microscope in the Shared Microscopy Facility is the only one on the UCSB campus available to these investigators. The current microscope has been extensively utilized, generating data that has been presented in over 40 peer-reviewed publications in the last five years. It is anticipated that this level of productivity will continue to expand as a consequence of an increasing number of applications for confocal studies afforded by the proposed instrumentation, as well as its streamlined data handling capabilities and superior reliability characteristics. The enhanced multi-labeling capabilities and capacity to support living cell studies will allow investigators to explore novel research avenues that are unapproachable with our current instrumentation.
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