Facilities and Services
Research Highlights
The nature of the microscopy core requires superficial collaborative work with many users from a great diversity of disciplines. Major collaborations are mostly aimed at developing particular technologies to enable the science from the participating lab.
One major focus has been the streamlining and automation of Arabidopsis seedling screens, where a custom 48-well gasket plate has been developed to carry samples all the way through incubation and imaging without manual manipulation. A semi-automated screening system was developed where gasket plates are mapped on either a flatbed scanner or Typhoon imager; the maps are annotated with hit points, then the plate is loaded into the Pathway HT, which runs an automatically generated macro for auto-focus and imaging at all annotation sites. This methodology works, but adoption has been limited by cost, and many users prefer to navigate specimen-space manually. Eventually, we expect to be able to automate the placement of single Arabidopsis seeds in specific well locations for screening studies, and we have been successful in doing this robotically for small clusters of seeds. In spring 2008, a senior graduate student will be hired part time, to conclude work on this Arabidopsis screening capability.
Listed below are publications that acknowledged the contribution of the UCR Noel T. Keen Hall Microscopy Core towards their research.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Phillips KS, Han JH, Martinez M, Wang Z, Carter D, Cheng Q. (2006) Nanoscale glassification of gold substrates for surface plasmon resonance analysis of protein toxins with supported lipid membranes. Anal Chem. 78: 596-603. HubMed
K. Scott Phillips, Yi Dong, David Carter, and Quan Cheng (2005). Stable and Fluid Ethylphosphocholine Membranes in a Poly(dimethylsiloxane) Microsensor for Toxin Detection in Flooded Water. Anal. Chem 77(9): 2960 - 2965; (Article) HubMed
Hicks, Glenn R., Enrique Rojo, Seho Hong, David Carter, and Natasha V. Raikhel (2004). Germinating pollen has tubular vacuoles, displays highly dynamic vacuole biogenesis, and requires VACUOLELESS1 for proper function. Plant Physiology 134:1227-1239. HubMed
Guo-Wei Tian, Amitabh Mohanty, S. Narasimha Chary, Shijun Li, Brigitte Paap,
Georgia Drakakaki, Charles D. Kopec, Jianxiong Li, David Ehrhardt, David Jackson,
Seung Y. Rhee, Natasha V. Raikhel, and Vitaly Citovsky (2004). High-Throughput Fluorescent Tagging of Full-Length Arabidopsis Gene Products in Planta. Plant Physiology 135:25-38. HubMed
Surpin, Marci, Haiyan Zheng, Miyo T. Morita, Cheiko Saito, Emily Avila, Joshua J. Blakeslee, Anindita Bandyopadhyay, Valya Kovaleva, David Carter, Angus Murphy, Masao Tasaka, and Natasha Raikhel (2003). The VTI family of SNARE proteins is necessary for plant viability and mediates different protein transport pathways. The Plant Cell 15:2885-2899. HubMed
Girke, Thomas, Mihri Ozkan, David Carter, and Natasha V. Raikhel (2003). Towards a modeling infrastructure for studying plant cells. Plant Physiology 132:410-414.
Avila, Emily, Jan Zouhar, April Agee, David Carter, S. Narasimha Chary, and Natasha Raikhel (2003). Tools to study organelle biogenesis. Point mutation lines with disrupted vacuoles and high-speed confocal screening of green fluorescent protein-tagged organelles. Plant Physiology 133:1-4. HubMed