Dear friends of imaging,

The BioAxial company and the Imagopole (the imaging platform of the Institut Pasteur) has collaborated for several years around the development of an entirely new approach to super-resolution imaging based upon conical diffraction. It is now a microscopy system, available commercially (http://www.bioaxial.com/products/codim100/product-description), the CODIM100.

We host such a system, and it will be made available at the Imagopole to all scientists, following the Imagopole access policy (as any regular system) by the end of September 2015. The CODIM100 is very simple to use, and can be operated by autonomous users, following a short training session.

We organize an open day for the system Thursday the 24th of September. You are cordially invited to bring your sample and try the CODIM100. We will be there all day to help you setting up the microscope to harvest the best images.

If you are interested in coming to this open day, please write to Jean-Yves Tinevez (tinevez@pasteur.fr) and state your needs. We will allocate a slot depending on the time you need. We have the facilities to host and prepare live samples.

If you are interested in super-resolution microscopy, keep reading on.
While there already exist several super-resolution modalities, this system is distinguished by the unique combination of several performance features. In brief,:

• it is ideal for live-cell super-resolution imaging (even long term time-lapse imaging);
• it works with any fluorescent sample without any special preparation;
• it has a very good sensitivity even to weakly labelled samples.

It is attached to a normal laser scanning confocal microscope. The typical usage is to image a sample with normal LSCM mode, then draw a ROI over the acquired image to rescan it in super-resolution. Here are some quick specifications of the super-resolution module:

• Excitation lines: 488, 561 and 640nm
• Objectives: 40x 0.95 air / 60x 1.2 water / 60x 1.49 oil.
• Acquisition speed: a few seconds for a 25µm2 ROI.
• Labels: any that can be excited with the wavelength mentioned above
• Sample prep: any confocal or live sample with 0.17mm glass bottom coverslip. No restrictions on mounting media for fixed samples.
• XY resolution: 110 nm with 488nm laser/0.95 NA, 90 nm with 488 nm laser/1.20 NA
• Very low excitation power: less than 1 µW/µm2.

Some examples: