Chamber for Live-Cell Imaging

An environmentally controlled chamber that provides heat, humidity, and CO2 balance for pH stability enables researchers to keep cells viable for extended periods and--for the first time--allows developmental processes to be viewed as a biologic movie.

SmartSlide is designed to advance the understanding of biologic processes by making it possible to keep cells viable for long periods of time while performing sensitive and quantitative imaging experiments. Applications for SmartSlide include stem cell research, cancer research, drug interaction response and development, and improvement of the cell culture process.

The SmartSlide system has three primary components: a disposable cell culture slide, a controller, and smartware software. The first layer of the slide on the bottom is coated with a proprietary thin film layer to provide stable heating of cell culture walls. The controller connects to a computer and uses specialized software to manage the temperature of the slide as well as CO2 and nutrient flow at programmed levels that approximate the natural host environment of the living cell. The SmartSlide technology easily integrates into most existing imaging platforms and is adaptable to individual system needs. For inverted microscopes with oil immersion objective, the SmartSlide system includes a simple but effective heater for the objective lens.

"Using SmartSlide, we have been able to visualize the emergence of feather primordial and track cellular patterns in real-time, an achievement which would have been impossible with the frequent in-and-out transfers required by standard incubator systems,” noted Randall Widelitz, Ph.D., of Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA). Dr. Widelitz presented a poster on the use of the system at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology in San Francisco (CA, USA) in December 2005.

SmartSlide was developed by WaferGen, Inc. (Fremont, CA, USA), a company developing data-collection-and-analysis products for cell biology applications. "The SmartSlide system makes it possible to investigate, in real-time, biological questions that are either temperature and/or time dependent by approximating an in-vivo environment under the microscope,” said Alnoor Shivji, chairman, WaferGen. "It essentially offers researchers the opportunity to see a movie versus a snapshot of the process in question.”





Related Links:
WaferGen