Beginning on the first of November, 2009 BIPL will be raising its rental fees on the equipment housed within the lab.

All confocals will be changing from $51 to $53 per hour.
The Xenogen and Maestro workstation will change from $34 to $35.50 per hour.
All other workstations will change from $26 to $27.50 per hour.

On 1 July 08, BIPL will switching billing systems along with the University at large. As you begin reserving time on our equipment, please take few minutes to double check your account settings to make sure that they are up to date. Please be aware that the old connections between users and account numbers may have been broken by this switch over. The new format that we will be using will be the following fields separated by a dash:

• Fund
• Dept. ID
• Program
• Chart Field 1
• Chart Field 2
• Empl. ID
• Cost Share
• Project

If you already have an account with BIPL, you will need to log in and make the changes to your profile account. Some of these fields may not be present in your particular case. If so, use a 'x' to indicate an empty field. All fields are required.

Additionally, the reservation website will be given a new URL: reservations.bipl.umn.edu
Please update any bookmarks you may have.

As of 16 May 08, the Bio-Rad 1024 confocal has been replaced by a new Olympus Fluoview 1000 Upright Microscope.

Taken from the Olympus web site:

The new Olympus FluoView FV1000 is the latest in point-scanning, point-detection, confocal laser scanning microscopes designed for today's intensive and demanding biological research investigations. Excellent resolution, bright and crisp optics, and high efficiency of excitation, coupled to an intuitive user interface and affordability are key characteristics of this state-of-the-art optical microscopy system.

When configured for visible excitation, the FluoView FV1000 is capable of simultaneous collection from up to 4 detection channels using multiple laser and conventional illumination sources. Wavelength selection and flexible control of laser intensity with advanced AOTF technology permits reduced specimen fading, lower crosstalk, and excitation area selection. Olympus confocal microscopes are ideal for 3-D imaging, time course experiments, energy transfer visualization, and photobleaching recovery experiments.

It has been brought to our attention that there may be problems running Confocal Assistant on Windows XP. It light of that we are suggesting and encouraging our visitors to move over to using ImageJ instead.

Taken from the ImageJ web site:
ImageJ is a public domain Java image processing program inspired by NIH Image for the Macintosh. It runs, either as an online applet or as a downloadable application, on any computer with a Java 1.1 or later virtual machine. Downloadable distributions are available for Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X and Linux.

It can display, edit, analyze, process, save and print 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit images. It can read many image formats including TIFF, GIF, JPEG, BMP, DICOM, FITS and "raw". It supports "stacks", a series of images that share a single window. It is multithreaded, so time-consuming operations such as image file reading can be performed in parallel with other operations.

Additionally we provide two macros that can be used with ImageJ in your image analysis.

BIPL