Mission and Services

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, Training and Support

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