Integrated Microscopy and Imaging Laboratory (IMIL)

This facility is located on the TAMHSC College of Medicine’s Temple campus and is connected to the Medical Research Building (MRB). The facility houses the following principal shared microscopic imaging systems:

Olympus Confocal Microscope. The microscope includes: IX-71 Olympus inverted microscope, Fluoview 300 confocal scanning head, Blue Diode laser, HeNe and Ar gas lasers, and PC workstation. This system is designed for studies of live or fixed cells and tissues. Confocal microscopy allows optical sectioning of samples to determine 3-D information using fluorescence microscopy. This type of microscopy offers great utility for imaging discrete planes in thick specimens.

Leica AOBS SP2 Confocal-Multiphoton Microscope System. System includes: Leica DMIRE-2 inverted microscope, AOBS SP2 confocal scanning head, HeNe and Ar gas lasers, MaiTai Spectra Physics femtosecond laser and HP-based computer workstation. This system is designed for studies of live or fixed cells and tissues. Capabilities include: confocal microscopy, FRAP (fluorescence recovery after photo bleaching), FRET (Forster resonance energy transfer), and multiphoton excitation. The system is further upgradeable for UV excitation and FLIM (fluorescence life time imaging).

Fast NanoFluor II Integrated Microscope System. The microscope system includes: IX81 Olympus inverted microscope with focus stabilizer, Yokogawa confocal scanning head, TIRFM (Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscopy) attachment, Atomic Force Bioscope SZ closed loop and Ar/Kr gas laser. This is an integrated scanning and optical microscope system that allows for recording fast events at the intracellular level (calcium sparks/waves, molecular dynamics) combined with mechanical stimulation or manipulation. The optical system allows for thin sectioning at the cell-coverslip interface or fast sectioning through the cell body. The Atomic Force Microscope allows for cell imaging, dynamic force spectroscopy (force measurements, stiffness, loading) or manipulation.

Meridian Ultima-Z Laser-Scanning Confocal Microscope System. This microscope is outfitted with visible and UV lasers and is used for ratio imaging. The system is capable of sorting adherent cells, monitoring fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), and releasing caged signaling molecules.

The IMIL has 8 imaging/preparation rooms that occupy ~3000 total square feet. The facility includes four imaging rooms, one for each of the large, shared imaging instruments; additionally, there is one preparation room, one cell culture room, one histology room, and an image processing room.

Computational Biology/Bioinformatics Laboratory (CBBL)

The NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative Consortium (http://www.bisti.nih.gov/CompuBioDef.pdf) recently defined computational biology as “The development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioral, and social systems.

The CBBL core facility supports departmental biocomputing research focused on the analysis of cardiovascular regulatory networks. Our long-term goal is to build the infrastructure, personnel, equipment and expertise to span the range from traditional systems biology (large scale interactions at the organ level) to the interactome (interactions among proteins and other molecules within cells) down to the level of computational genomics (linking gene regulatory networks to patterns of gene and protein expression involved in these cellular processes).

Research in computational biology closely overlaps bioinformatics, defined by the NIH Consortium as “Research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data."

In this regard, the CBBL complements experimental genomics and proteomics technologies by aiding in the development of mathematical, data retrieval, and visualization tools for identifying and extracting key interrelationships from DNA microarray expression data and from documented biomolecular interactions (for examples see http://vanburenlab.tamhsc.edu/tools.html). The department has recently acquired an Apple XServer Cluster for the CBBL that has 112 computing cores, together with BioTema's iNquiry, which is a suite of bioinformatics software applications built to run on a computing cluster.

It is anticipated that the CBBL will also collaborate closely with the Integrated Microscopy and Imaging Laboratory (IMIL) by providing data storage, rapid indexing/retrieval capabilities and access to fast image analysis processing.