The WUCCI-Neuro offers access to a dedicated state-of-the-art tissue culture facility, a diascopic and episcopic brightfield illumination stereoscope, and a comprehensive tissue clearing pipeline featuring some of the newest methodologies for processing and labeling whole organ samples.
Tissue Culture
Thermo Heracell Stainless Steel VIOS 160i CO2 incubators
The Thermo Heracell 160i are 165L water-jacketed stainless steel incubators and are freely available to users of the center who are running live cell experiments. Each incubator is maintained at 5% CO2, with one incubator preset at 37ºC for mammalian cells and tissues, and the other preset at 28ºC for users studying zebrafish.
Nikon Ts2 -FL
The Nikon TS2-FL is a brightfield, phase contrast, and 3-color fluorescent screening scope aimed to allow users to assay transfection efficacy, endogenous fluorophore expression, and cell line viability. The microscope is equipped with a 4X, 10X, and 20X objectives, and features an overhead direct light blocking curtain to reduce glare and enhance contrast.
Thermo Sorval ST8 Benchtop Centrifuge
The ST8 is a ventilated bench top centrifuge with swinging bucket rotor (TX-150), for up to 8- 50ml conicals or 24-15ml tubes. The centrifuge is capable of up to 4500rpm with the TX-150 rotor.
LabGardClass II Type A2 Biosafety Cabinet
The LabGard NU-581 is designed for work with cytotoxic powders by incorporating an additional tier of HEPA filtration underneath the work surface and closely monitoring cabinet performance with two airflow sensors whose data is displayed on a touch panel. The cabinet features built-in vacuum and electrical outlets.
Tissue Clearing
The WUCCI-Neuro offers a comprehensive sample clearing pipeline, using either iDISCO for organic solvent- based tissue clearing, or ETC- or passive CLARITY with scaffolding via SHIELD.
LifeCanvas SmartBatch+
The SmartBatch+ is an electrophoretic tissue clearing (ETC) clearing platform capable of clearing up to 12 large samples at a time in less than 30 hours. The system is, also capable of rapidly staining cleared samples using the eFLASH protocol. Antibodies compatible with eFLASH can be found at LifeCanvas.
Screening
The WUCCI-Neuro features a epi- and diascopic brightfield stereoscope to allow users to visualize IHC slides, large samples, or whole animals.
Zeiss Stereo Discovery v.8
The Stereo Discovery v.8 features brightfield and oblique diascopic illumination and cold light episcopic illumination, and a manual 1-8X magnification. Equipped with a 1X objective featuring a free working distance of 60mm, the Discovery is capable of visualizing whole mount samples, as well as discrete regions on an IHC slide. The easy to use Zeiss 305 Color camera can be used to acquire still images via the accompanying ZEN software.
