News and Press Releases

June 19, 2020

Study on membrane asymmetry

Measured with a Nikon A1 confocal equipped with PicoQuant´s LSM upgrade kit

Recently Ilya Levental, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston toghether with his coworkers published an impressive study in Nature Chemical Biology in which FLIM and FCS, combined with a smart staining protocol and atomistic simulations, shed light on the structural asymmetry of plasma membranes. FLIM of the lipid packing reporter dye Di4, which enables leaflet-selective staining of the plasma membrane, revealed that the outer leaflet is more tightly packed. Correspondingly, FCS diffusion measurements of fluorescent proteins anchored either to the outer or inner leaflet were consistent with computational predictions that inner leaflet components diffuse faster. For this work, they used their Nikon A1 confocal equipped with PicoQuant´s LSM upgrade kit.

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41589-020-0529-6
PicoQuant's LSM upgrade kit: product website

May 20, 2020

Jörg Enderlein and Christian Eggeling about scanning FCS

Significance and advantages of this method

A new line scan mode in our SymPhoTime 64 software now allows acquiring scanning Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (sFCS) data with our time-resolved microscope MicroTime 200. In interviews that were given during our 25th Workshop on “Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Super-resolution Microscopy” in September 2019 by Jörg Enderlein from the Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany and Christian Eggeling from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany, they also talked about the significance and advantages of scanning FCS.

Video: Jörg Enderlein and Christian Eggeling about scanning FCS

Product website: MicroTime 200

Application website: Scanning FCS

May 19, 2020

Visit our application lab virtually and perform real measurements

Remote demos of our spectroscopy and microscopy systems and their respective software

Even as the world is slowly moving towards a “new normal”, we are not yet able to visit or welcome every customer in person. However, we want to invite you for a virtual stay in our application lab. There you can get a closer look at our spectroscopy and microscopy systems and have in-depth discussions with our application specialists from the safety and comfort of your own place. These remote demo sessions are not limited to just talking about instrument specifications or theoretical aspects. We are also more than happy to perform real measurements together with you using samples that you send us.

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May 7, 2020

Leveraging undesired cross-labeling effects in indirect immunofluorescence

A recent article in Scientific Reports presents a novel FLIM based approach

In an excellent work of former Marie Curie Research Fellow at PicoQuant Sumeet Rohilla and the group of Andreas Hocke from the Charité Universitätsmedizin, a novel FLIM based approach has been introduced in an article in Scientific Reports for leveraging undesired cross-labeling effects in indirect immunofluorescence (IMF). The increased specificity allowed for the seperation of various standard antibody-based labels with increased specificity using spectral FLIM and pattern matching. Consequently, no establishment of new anti-body labeling protocols is required for avoiding cross-labeling which saves cost and time while misinterpretation such as wrongly attributed spatial distribution of biomolecules is avoided.

The paper is available at nature.com: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60877-8