Project Support

The Georg-August-University Göttingen in Germany.

The Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, WI, is an independent biomedical institute exploring uncharted scientific territory to discover tomorrow’s cures. It is home of many great resources that are crucial for the Flamingo project. For example, many of the custom parts for our Flamingo prototypes were manufactured in the Fab Lab.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s mission is to find new ways to leverage technology, community-driven solutions and collaboration to accelerate progress in science and education. We are proud to have Michael be awarded as CZI Imaging Scientist.

The mission of the Beckman Foundation is to support leading edge research that opens up new avenues. A grant funded by the foundation will have Jan, Kevin Eliceiri and Vikas Singh lead an initiative to develop and advance light sheet microscopy implementations that are smarter in both image acquisition and processing.

PCO develops and manufactures high-performing camera systems. Our Flamingo microscopes use pco.panda 4.2 cameras, which offer great sCMOS performance in a tiny blue package. For even more demanding applications, we are implementing pco.edge 4.2 cameras.

Toptica develops and manufactures high-end laser systems for scientific and industrial applications. In the Flamingo, we use Toptica’s iChrome CLE four-color laser engine as the main light source. It’s compact enough to be integrated in our control box and provides 405, 488, 561 and 640nm laser lines with plenty of power for light sheet microscopy. The integrated alignment feature is great for Flamingos, which are often on the move.

Chroma designs and manufactures optical filters for a wide range of applications including light microscopy. We have been using Chroma filters in our custom microscopes ever since and continue to do so in Flamingos. We use them primarily as emission filters in the detection path, where they play a crucial role in forming correct images of samples.

Nikon provides, among other products, microscope-based imaging solutions. For our Flamingo microscopes, we integrate selected water-dipping objective lenses from Nikon’s CFI60 and CFI75 series for both illumination and detection. Nikon lenses can also be combined with tube lenses of different focal length, giving us the ability to change a Flamingo’s magnification without having to change the objective lens.

PI offers advanced drive technologies and system solutions. Motorized stages from PI have been the go-to choice for most of our light sheet microscopes even before the Flamingo. Both their linear and rotational motors have enabled fast sample positioning and multi-day timelape experiments with lots of repetitive movements. For the Flamingo, we picked PI’s L-505 and M-11x linear stages and combined them with U-628 and U-651 rotational stages.

AHF offers optical filters for microscopy, among others. For the Flamingo, we rely on their emission and neutral density filters.