Thanks to the Dean’s Matching Fund from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the Office of Research Initiatives and Infrastructure, the imaging capabilities of the Optical Imaging Facility at the Broad CIRM Center (BCC) will be expanded with the addition of a Leica Microsystems Stellaris 8 microscope with FLIM and STED in summer 2023.

Stellaris 8 is Leica’s flagship confocal microscope platform and provides standard confocal capabilities as well as turnkey Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM). FLIM takes advantage of the period between the excitation and emission of a fluorescent molecule. FLIM applications include simplified FRET, biosensing, auto-fluorescence removal and lifetime-based separation of fluorescent molecules with similar spectral profiles.

STED (Stimulated Emission Depletion) is a super-resolution technique allowing for optical resolution to approximately 20nm. This technique uses an infrared depletion laser “donut” to effectively generate an excitation point of light below the diffraction limit.