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Institute for Research in Biomedicine
Istituto di Ricerca in Biomedicina

Via Vincenzo Vela 6 - CH-6500 Bellinzona
Tel. +41 91 820 0300 - Fax +41 91 820 0302 - info [at] irb [dot] usi [dot] ch

Imaging Facility

Manager: David Jarrossay

This imaging facility is central to most of the IRB research projects. The IRB has a state-of-the-art flow cytometry facility that is run by David Jarrossay  who takes care of the cell sorting, maintenance of the equipment, instruction and advice to the new operators, in addition to performing his own research. Erica Montani has a specific experience in confocal microscopy and high content cellular analysis and supervises all the microscopes present at the IRB.

Flow cytometry

The Flow Cytometry lab provides investigators with equipment and support for cell sorting (separation), acquisition, and analysis of flow cytometric data with a variety of state-of-art multicolor flow cytometry instruments.

Cell sorting is performed via a FACSAria III sorter equipped with four lasers (488, 561, 640 and 405 nm excitation wavelengths) and 15 fluorescence channels detection. It can perform high speed sorting (up to 20,000 events/sec) with high-purity (up to 99%).

The Flow cytometry lab is equipped with an advanced benchtop analyzers BDLSR Fortessa equipped with four lasers (488, 561, 640 and 405 nm excitation wavelengths) and 16 fluorescence channels. The lab also offers to researchers one  FACSCantoII analyser (three lasers-eight colors), a FACSCanto I (two lasers-six colors), a FACSCalibur (two lasers-four colors) and a FACSArray plate based flow cytometer (two lasers-four channels). Both FACSCanto are equipped with HTS for high throughput screening for 96 and 384 wells plates.

The lab is also equipped with a Flexmap 3D instrument for bead-based multiplexing for up to 500 analytes per well on a 96 or 384 well plate format.

The flow lab offers efficient support and high quality instruments. The staff provides cell sorting on BD FACSAria III, individual training on bench top analysers, maintenance of all instruments and assistance with experimental design, data analysis and troubleshooting.

 

Microscopy

The main Microscopy Facility comprises a suite of confocal, high-content imaging system for image acquisition and analysis, wide-field upright and inverted microscopes:

  • Confocal microscope. Leica sp5, equipped with new generation detectors (HyD detector) and high resolution objective (100x, NA 1.44) 
  • High-content imaging system. BD Pathway 855, wide-field or confocal automated microscope suitable for screening. Equipped with Twister II Plate Handler (Caliper) allows to acquire and analyze up to 35 plates. 
  • Wide-field microscopes. Nikon Eclipse upright and inverted microscopes. A Zeiss axiovert 200 inverted microscope set for calcium measurement experiments.  

 

With these systems we are able to perform most of the procedures for cells and tissues imaging including FRET, FRAP and live cell imaging.

We also offer support for sample preparation, image analysis, deconvolution and 3D reconstruction thanks to a wide range of software such as MetaMorph (Molecular Devices), Imaris (Bitplane), ImageJ and CellProfiler.