The Turku Bioscience Centre at the University of Turku intends to purchase a conventional and broadly versatile research grade fully motorized wide-field light microscope for combined high-speed, high-throughput, and high-resolution analysis of molecular interactions in a large variety of biological specimens, ranging from live single cells to fixed thick tissue sections, and more.

The system to be purchased must include:

1) A versatile, future-proof, fully motorized, research grade, inverted light microscope body, equipped for both fluorescence and trans-illumination imaging, with a PC workstation and image acquisition and image post-processing software suitable for automatic, multi-colour image acquisition of 2D and 3D single position, automatic multi-position, and tiled image data sets in fluorescence mode with a high-sensitivity monochromatic CMOS camera, and in colorimetric mode with a high-sensitivity colour CCD or CMOS camera. The microscope system must include a black cage incubator with temperature and CO2 control to enable live cell imaging under physiological conditions (37C and 5% CO2).

2) A validated and demonstratable strategy for live background subtraction that enable on-the-fly adjustments of image acquisition settings in thicker samples (e.g. 50-100 µm thick tissue sections, spheroids and organoids, zebra fish embryos, and similar) that normally suffers from an overwhelming out-of-focus signal such that the in-focus signal is indistinguishable in live imaging mode. For full flexibility, the system should furthermore include validated strategies for further post-processing image enhancement by built in image de-convolution capabilities with a specific aim at tackling improvement for deep imaging in thick samples.

3) A range of research grade microscope objectives suitable for imaging a broad range of samples and sample configurations including for specialised imaging of coverslip-free mounted samples on standard 1mm thick glass slides for downstream proteomic analysis.