Leica TCS SPE vs LSM 5 Exciter

[Sandrine Pouvreau]

Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
Hi everyone.
We are currently in the process of buying a confocal for our lab. We want to use it principaly with live cells, to do calcium measurement, as well as some imaging of transfected cells (proteins tagged with GFP, YFP...). We want to be able to couple it with a patch clamp set up. We basically are now considering 2 offers : one from Leica for a TCS SPE, and one from Zeiss for a LSM 5 exciter. Could anybody working with either of these confocal give me some opinions about them?   Both of them are offered with several laser wavelength that satisfy my needs. The leica has the prisme diffraction system however, but not the Zeiss. Which is not so nice when one want to image 2 dyes and avoid any contamination of one channel on the other one. But the Leica does not allow to do sequential line scan. Does anybody knows if the one from Zeiss has this possibility? I would for now prefer the Zeiss, but I red somewhere that their resolution is not so good. Could somebody give me more information about that?
Sorry, but I'm quite unfamiliar with Zeiss, and I have right now hard time to decide.
Many thanks.
Sandrine

[George McNamara]

Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal Hi Sandrine,

The good news is that Case12 and Case16 FP's look pretty good for single wavelength Ca++ imaging and uses 488 nm excitation. See http://www.evrogen.com/Case12.shtml   Ratiometric dyes may not be needed in confocal microscopy because the optical slice thickness should be constant. On the other hand, a second simultaneous emission channel/dye/FP may be useful for tracking power fluctuations and other instrument glitches.

The bad news is the only way to find out which - if either - instrument fits your needs, you should get demo's. Plan to get a temperature/humidity controller for the system, and ideally include that in the demo.

You should also think about whether you need maximum spatial resolution, where point scanners win, or speed and dynamic range, where a spinning disk or other instrument might work best. There are several companies selling spinning disk systems, such as Solamere, Visitech, and Andor. A complete spinning disk system should cost less than an SPE. There are also other high speed alternatives, such as swept field confocals from Visitech and Nikon.


Best wishes,

George



At 02:58 PM 10/19/2007, you wrote:

Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
Hi everyone.
We are currently in the process of buying a confocal for our lab. We want to use it principaly with live cells, to do calcium measurement, as well as some imaging of transfected cells (proteins tagged with GFP, YFP...). We want to be able to couple it with a patch clamp set up. We basically are now considering 2 offers : one from Leica for a TCS SPE, and one from Zeiss for a LSM 5 exciter. Could anybody working with either of these confocal give me some opinions about them?   Both of them are offered with several laser wavelength that satisfy my needs. The leica has the prisme diffraction system however, but not the Zeiss. Which is not so nice when one want to image 2 dyes and avoid any contamination of one channel on the other one. But the Leica does not allow to do sequential line scan. Does anybody knows if the one from Zeiss has this possibility? I would for now prefer the Zeiss, but I red somewhere that their resolution is not so good. Could somebody give me more information about that?
Sorry, but I'm quite unfamiliar with Zeiss, and I have right now hard time to decide.
Many thanks.
Sandrine

 

George McNamara, Ph.D.
University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine
Image Core
Miami, FL 33010
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305-243-8436 office
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http://home.earthlink.net/~geomcnamara/
http://www.sylvester.org/health_pro/shared_resources/index.asp (see Analytical Imaging Core Facility)