Fluorescence Imaging Facility (FIF) Elba Serrano, Ph.D., Director Mary O'Connell, Ph.D., Associate Director V. Bleu Knight, Assistant Lab Manager W 156 Skeen Hall, NMSU Main Campus, Las Cruces, NM Phone: (505) 646-2722 Operating Hours: By Appointment Only (Appointments available 8:00a - 5:00p Monday through Friday)

The New Mexico State University Fluorescence Imaging Facility is a university wide multi-user laboratory that is managed with support from the Research Centers of the College of Agriculture Home Economics and the College of Arts and Sciences. The facility was established through a grant from the Department of Defense (ARO-DURIP) to researchers in the Departments of Agronomy and Horticulture, Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biology at New Mexico Sate University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The facility operates a BioRad 1024 ES laser scanning confocal imaging system attached to an olympus BX-50 microscope. Our acquisition system (LaserSharp, running under windows NT) operates a krypton/argon laser with 3 excitation lines and simultaneous or sequential detection of emission spectra in one, two, or three 8-bit channels (PMT detectors) .

The Krypton/Argon laser has three lines, 488, 568, & 647 nanometers, for fluorescence excitation of dye-labeled samples. This allows the use of fluorescein, rhodamine and Cy5 based dyes or any other dyes having excitation wavelengths near these laser lines. For more information please see the Fluorescent Dye Emission Chart (courtsey BioRad, PDF document 1.83 MB). In addition, we can perform reflection imaging of immunogold-labeled samples. The confocal laser scanning microscope allows optical sectioning of samples up to 200 microns thick. This allows the reconstruction of 2-D and 3-D images with low background fluorescence and outstanding resolution.

Our facility does bright field and standard fluorscence imaging. Images are digitized and can be exported to photoshop of other image-analysis programs as *.tif files or movie files. In addition, the FIF maintains a copy of the Metamorph software package for image-analysis, stack reconstruction, movie creation and a host of other options.

Student and faculty training in fluorescence imaging applications is promoted by the FIF through seminars, workshops and courses.