Understanding and managing microorganisms to improve our environment
A New Tool Comes to BSCEB
By: Steven Hart
This news may take your breath away…especially because Dr. Torres’ new microscope is the only anaerobic set-up on campus, and because it has so many possible applications for your environmental biotechnology research! Confocal BRIGHTFIELD, DIC, and EPIFLUORESCENCE modes are all possible, within an anaerobic glove box (+ or – O2), and with the guidance of Dr. Steven Hart, who presented an overview during the Torres/Krajmalnik-Brown Lab Meeting, today (5/20/20). Steven is developing a detailed SOP for the instrument. However, he can assist you, now, with training and optimization for your unique experimental needs. This system is equipped with most excitation and emission filters that work with the most common dies. Using ThermoFisher Spectraviewer, Steven can help you select viable dyes that don’t damage your cells, that don’t spectrally interfere with each other, and that allow you to evaluate multiple parameters simultaneously. In addition to a mercury lamp for standard microscopy procedures, four rapid, scanning LED laser channels allow you to pinpoint discreet excitation bands for enhanced intensity to create 3D reconstructions and movies of your biofilms, flocks, and even bulk systems. You can even image from an open reactor because this microscope can be in an anaerobic environment and we have two extremely good water dipping objectives that can be directly in your media with little interference. We might even consider building some reactors to accommodate dipping objectives. By the way, sludge responds very well to FISH. Even though it’s so opaque, you can image it well by combining confocal and fluorescence techniques. Almost all of the controls can be managed through the software making them accessible from home, which opens opportunities for long time courses or growth experiments. Steven can even show you how to make spectacular PowerPoint displays of tiled images.