This application is for the purchase of a state-of-the-art Zeiss confocal microscope to be housed in a new Biomedical Research building, the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine (LMM) at Brown University. This equipment will serve 15 NIH-funded faculty. Members of laboratories using the scope include students (graduate, medical, MD-PhD candidates, and undergraduates) post-doctoral PhD fellows, medical fellows from clinical departments, and technical staff, for a total of over 60 potential users. The new LMM is located near research buildings of the Brown affiliated hospitals. LMM houses three basic science and medical school departments (Departments of Pathology, of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry). In addition, there are three Centers located in the new building, including Center for Genetics and Genomics and a new Center for Environmental Health and Technology. Major User Group for this new equipment includes all departments and Centers in LMM. The research projects for which the new imaging will be applied span from the molecular basis of aging and Alzheimer's disease, to emerging pathogens, and toxicology. Most organisms to be imaged require temperature control for physiological homeostasis. The opportunities for cross-disciplinary fertilization among teams of medical and basic science experts are immense in this new environment. Molecular imaging of live cells has become such a powerful tool that most basic research questions cannot be addressed definitively without it. For live recording of cellular/molecular dynamics, specialized equipment such as the confocal microscope proposed here is necessary. Multispectral un-mixing provided by the META and multitracker scan head and software options allow up to eight fluorescent markers to be imaged in the same specimen over time. With the motorized z-stage, this imaging is captured in 5 dimensions (molecular, 3D structural and time lapse). This specialized microscope must be housed in close proximity to the laboratories where the living specimens are cultured/created, as transport of such specimens produces artifacts. At present, there is only one out-dated confocal in this new building, a Zeiss410 purchased in 1993. This shared instrumentation proposal is to add a new microscope to the imaging facility at This new microscope will be managed under the existing LeDuc Biomedical Imaging Facility and the Confocal Users Committee. Relevance: The Major Users Group for this proposed confocal microscope includes a range of clinical, translational and basic science NIH-funded investigators spanning a range of departments and disciplines. Their research applications address fundamental questions regarding prevalent disease with important impacts on public health. ? ? ?
