The Morphoscope / Polytechnique BioImaging Facility received the IBiSA labelled in 2019. It is hosted and operated by the Laboratory for Optics & Biosciences (LOB) at Ecole Polytechnique, one of the founding members of the France BioImaging infrastructure. The Morphoscope facility results from a major equipment investment grant initiated in 2013 (Equipex Morphoscope2 project). It is based on the expertise of the LOB Advanced Microscopies group (9 tenured scientists, 1 tenured research engineer, 1 zootechnician, students, and access to LOB electronics & mechanics workshops). One important specificity of this platform is its emphasis on technology development and methodological innovation. In particular, the host team is a world leader in multiphoton microscopy of tissues, and the platform hosts both state-of-the- art commercial systems and lab-built systems based on cutting-edge technologies.
Imaging equipment is organized along three complementary needs:
- deep tissue imaging with multi-contrast nonlinear microscopy;
- fast imaging of semi-transparent samples using light-sheet excitation microscopy;
- super-resolution optical microscopy.
In addition, we have an expertise in large-volume bioimage informatics (e.g. managing & processing 3D images with >10^10 voxels)
We can provide the following:
- Case study, expertise, and technological innovation in cell and tissue imaging.
- Tissue imaging:
- multicontrast multiphoton microscopy: 2PEF, SHG, THG, polarimetry, FLIM, CARS, multicolor 2-photon through wavelength mixing;
- deep-tissue three-photon microscopy (Light Sci App 2018);
- large volume multicolor microscopy of uncleared tissue ex vivo (ChroMS, multicolor 2P integrated with automated serial cutting, Nat Commun 2019);
- Fast imaging:
- standard and 2-photon light-sheet microscopy (Nat Methods 2014).
- Super-resolved optical imaging:
- TIRF-SIM microscopy.
Installed equipment:
Application-oriented setups (access through collaborations or reservation):
- Multimodal/multicolor multiphoton microscope (2PEF, SHG, THG) – LaVision Biotec, Trimscope-II equipped with three femtosecond beams.
- Super-resolution SIM / TIRF microscope – GE Healthcare, DeltaVision OMX SR.
- Confocal microscope (FRAP, white light laser, resonant scanner) – Leica, TCS SP 8X.
- Multi-view light-sheet microscope – Luxendo-Bruker, MuVi-SPIM.
Methodology-oriented setups (collaborative access):
- Multimodal multiphoton microscope (2PEF, SHG, THG, FLIM, CARS, polar.) – Lab-built.
- Multicolor 2PEF microscope (wavelength mixing, brainbow) – Lab-built.
- 3-photon/THG microscope – Lab-built.
- Two-photon light-sheet microscope – Lab-built.
Zebrafish facility. Capacity 6000 fish.
Secured image server with an OMERO installation (70 TB).
One GPU compute server with NVidia v100x3
Several image processing/analysis workstations, including 3 Imaris licences.
Microscopy systems available @Morphoscope
