Zeiss LSM 980 Confocal Microscope

Project Summary/Abstract
We are requesting funds to support the purchase of a Zeiss LSM 980 Confocal Microscope with AiryScan2. This
instrument will be housed within the Neuroscience Microscopy Core (NMC) at the University of North Carolina
(UNC) School of Medicine. The mandate of this core facility is to provide a full spectrum of advanced systems
for cellular and molecular imaging of fixed and live samples, to implement new imaging technologies, and to offer
training, consultation, data analysis, image processing, and centralized technical expertise to support the
imaging needs of UNC and other researchers.
Confocal microscopy is an essential service provided by the center. The NMC currently has two 700-series Zeiss
confocal microscopes, which constitute ~45% (over 4,000 hours of usage during FY 2020) of the facility’s annual
hourly usage. Because Zeiss has announced that they will not be offering service contracts for the 700-series
microscopes after 9/30/2022, we cannot rely upon these heavily-used instruments to maintain their current usage
availabilities, and anticipate that they will become subject to more extended down-times. As there are an
additional four 700-series confocal microscopes on campus that are heavily used and facing the same
obsolescence cliff, investigators utilizing these microscopes will need access to a modern confocal to support
their projects (see Letters of Support from Drs. Ariel, Perdue and Bear). Demand for confocal imaging at our
Core will stay at and extend beyond capacity in order to maintain the current imaging needs for NIH-funded
investigator’s research on campus.
The need for this instrument is demonstrated in this application with several diverse NIH supported projects in
fields including; Neurobiology, Cell Biology, Developmental Biology, Infectious Disease and Cancer Biology. We
describe 8 NIH-funded projects that require the use of high-resolution optical sectioning provided by the
AiryScan2, in order to distinguish fine cellular features with high spatial resolution within small or densely packed
volumes (e.g., sites of RNA transcriptional activity inside the nucleus). Further, 9 NIH-funded PIs require
increased speed of acquisition provided by the LSM 980 Confocal Microscope to acquire datasets with confocal
spatial resolution (XYZ) over either large volumes (e.g., neuronal dendrites and axons in mouse brain tissue) or
to measure rapid dynamics (e.g. dynamics and directionality of the neuronal growth cone, and intracellular
dynamics of exosomes, mitochondria, and other cellular compartments and complexes).
Since the NMC commenced operations 18 years ago, it has become an integral part of the medical research
community currently supporting over 60 funded research projects. Acquisition of a Zeiss LSM 980 Confocal
Microscope system is an essential addition to the repertoire of instrumentation available to NIH-funded
investigators in order to not only maintain the current high-level of critical support for NIH-funded projects, but
also to enhance their research by providing modern imaging capabilities.