Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Amnis ImageStream Update

First of all, thanks to Scott Levy, and Tad George from Amnis for putting together a fine presentation. We'd appreciate it if you could take 30 seconds and fill out a 3 question survey from the flow facility regarding people's impression of the technology. Click here to take the survey.

The flow facility will be attempting to get some investigators to send samples to Amnis and generate some data. This way, you can get first hand information as to the utility of such an instrument. Your samples, your model, your questions. This will greatly help us in determining the likelihood of an instrument like this being used on campus. So, if you think one of your experiments or projects may benefit from this technology and want to try some samples (free of charge, I might add). Then send an email to rduggan@bsd.uchicago.edu, and I'll get you some info on sample prep and whatnot.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Amnis ImageStream Technical Seminar


The Flow Cytometry Facility will be hosting a technical seminar on the (not-so) new technology from Amnis (www.amnis.com) called the ImageStream. It acts very much like a flow cytometer; it has a fluid stream, lasers, detectors, and the such. However, it has one additional feature that makes it a totally different instrument. The detectors are actually CCD cameras, and they collect images of each cell as it passes through the lasers. You also get a bright-field image! This gives whole new meaning to your data since now you have the added power of morphology and fluorescence localization. You may be saying, well, yeah, that's nice, but i already do that in microscopy. The difference here is the power of "flow-like" computation. Standard fluorescence microscopes apply some software to try and deconvolude the data it records to get information like, frequency of a population, or fluorescence intensity measurements. Since these cells flow one-by-one through the sensing portion, there's no need to try and fish out whether what you're seeing is a single cell, or two cells that are really close together. Some of the "killer apps" for this instrument includes Nuclear Translocation, Apoptosis, Phagocytosis, Molecule Trafficking, FISH, and Gene Expression. The familiar dot-plot or histogram data presentation makes analysis very intuitive for a flow cytometrist. For more information regarding the upcoming seminar, please contact Ryan Duggan (rduggan@bsd.uchicago.edu).

Details:
Thursday, November 15, 2007
12:30PM - 1:30PM
BSLC Room 001