Microscopes - There are two basic types of microscopes: inverted and upright. An upright microscope is designed primarily to look at speciments mounted between coverslips and slides. An inverted microscope is designed to look through the bottom of a dish at live cells in medium. There are two main advantages to an inverted microscope. First, there is almost nothing you can do with an upright microscope that you can't do with an inverted microscope. Second, inverted microscopes are much safer for students to learn on as they cannot crash the objective into a glass slide. Third, for live cell imaging, an inverted microscope is greatly preferred since you can use a closed sterile dish. An upright microscope requires taking the lid off and dipping the objective into the media to image cells. For fixed samples on microscope slides, either works fine- you just have to invert the slide on the stage for one type vs. the other.
Video Macroscope
Navitar zoom macro lens threaded into a Sony XCD-X700 CCD camera
Mounted on Howard Electronics track stand
Reichert double fiber optic illuminator
Cameras- One does not need a cooled camera for transmitted light or fluorescence imaging. This is only necessary for the research situations where very faint signals are being examined. We have used relatively inexpensive Q-Imaging and Lumenera cameras. The most important issue for our laboratory course is that the camera is compatible with Micro-Manager so that we can control LED illumination and image capture with the same software. Not all cameras are compatible with Micro-Manager. For a list see: