Single Cell Facility

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Our Mission

The Single Cell Facility (SCF) is a central research and service platform at the ETH's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), located in Basel. It is a departmental multi-user facility that enables scientists and students to gain access to a high-end instrument portfolio for optical single cell analysis such as light microscopy and flow cytometry technology.

The SCF  is part of D-BSSE’s commitment to delineating the design principles of cells in stochastic environments and their exploitation for network design.

The centralized instrument pool is accompanied by expert service of staff members providing instrument training, maintenance of hardware and software, as well as advice on sample preparation, assay design, image analysis, and data management.

Our Equipment

Advanced Light Microscopy

Twenty imaging work stations are available that include single point and multipoint confocals, light sheet microscopy, multiphoton, superresolution, and automated wide field fluorescence microscopes. Most setups are equipped with environmental control for multidimentional automatized long-term life cell imaging. Sophisticated software can control elaborate routines involving on-the-fly image analysis and logical operations as well as the trigger of third-party equipment.
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Flow Cytometry

The facility hosts seven high-speed cell sorters (FACS) and five customized flow cytometry analyzers. Their technical features include image-based sorting, spectral detection, single cell deposit, with detection capacity up to 50 parameters. 
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Various Other Analysis Instruments 

like cell counter, stereo microscopes, simple fluorescence microscopes, various  absorbance and fluorescence (including bead-based assay) readers, bacteria/yeast growth analyzer, and nanodispensers can be used in our facility. See also our sister facility, the Labautomation Facility (LAF). 

Our Services

Training and Support

We support our users by organizing training sessions that enable independent instrument operation  and also by direct participation of our staff in research projects. We maintain and tune the equipment or perform component integration to provide dedicated solutions for specified assays. A state-of-the-art booking and resource management system (OpenIRIS) is provided to efficiently manage the usage of our equipment and operator assistance. To drive the development of our facility we continuously scout for new state of the art technologies and highlight them in seminars and discussions with our users to raise awareness of potential benefits for ongoing and future projects.

Data Management and Image Analysis

We provide access and training to a variety of sophisticated image analysis software tools to the extent of writing new scripts and software code if required. We adapted and maintain a data management system that is common for all data generated on our various instruments. Read more about:  data management image analysis

Our Staff

The facility is staffed with three microscopy specialists, three flow cytometry specialists and one specialist for image analysis and data management. 
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