Andor DragonFly (room 3103)

Information about the microscope

This system is a set up for live cell imaging and equipped with heating, humidified incubation chamber, 5% CO2 and Nikon perfect focus system (hardware autofocus).

DragonFly allows the use of various imaging modalities. Transmission and fluorescence in wide field and spinning disk confocal modes. For the spinning disk confocal, two pinholes can be selected: a small 25 µm pinhole for best z sectioning and a larger 40 µm pinhole for best signal to noise ratio. DragonFly can also be used for TIRF imaging. A GPU-accelerated deconvolution function is integrated.

Basic principle of spinning disk confocal microscopy.

The DragonFly is equipped with two cameras:

• iXon EM-CCD 1024x1024 has the highest sensitivity (95% peak QE, up to 53 full frames per second)
• Zyla4.2 sCMOS 2048x2048 the highest resolution and speed (80% peak QE, up to 400 fps in spinning disk mode, 1000 fps in wide-field and TIRF)

Each camera is equipped with zoom optics for 1x/1.5x/2x additional zoom factor. The two cameras can be used individually or together (dual camera) for simultaneous acquisition of two color channels.

The combination of powerful lasers and sensitive camera also makes it possible to use the system for single molecule localization microscopy (dSTORM) to achieve super-resolution (30 nm lateral resolution). A cylindrical lens is installed to achieve super-resolution also in 3D. Wide-field, spinning disk and TIRF modes can also be used to achieve super-resolution by SRRF (50-150 nm lateral resolution, no improvement in z, ~1 fps for 512x512, processing in imageJ) that does not need special fluorophores or sample preparation.

Additionally, DragonFly is equipped with a FRAPPA unit (micro mirror array) for photobleaching/photoactivation of freely definable regions using a high power 405 nm diode laser (1150 mW).

For more information on DragonFly see the maufacturer's website (oxinst.com)

Imaging laser lines:

* from fiber

Filter sets:

eyepieces: DAPI/GFP/TxRed

Objectives***

* from coverslip #1.5 (170 µm)

** effective camera field of view at 1x camera zoom

*** 6 installed in turret, optional (on request) as of September 2018: 4x dry and 40x dry.