Core Facilities
Resources
The Core Facilities at the IGB is a state-of-the-art resource for biological microscopy and image analysis. The core mission of the facility is to provide IGB faculty, as well as faculty from across campus with the tools and expertise to meet their imaging goals. In addition to providing technical assistance in acquiring and analyzing microscopy images the staff is also able to aid in designing and interpreting experiments.
What Core Facilities can offer
Twenty-four hour access
The Core is available 24 hours a day to support your research endeavors.
Education and Training
The Core Facilities trains hundreds of new users each year on one or more instruments, and are as essential portion of the IGB’s Pollen Power summer camp program, bringing middle-school age children from local communities to engage with the Core.
Our new user procedures form guides users through the training process. To request training (theory training is required for most microscopes including LSM 700, LSM 710, Apotome, SR-SIM, before the hands-on training), please fill out our training request form. Users have access to IGB disk space through the IGB computer and network resources group to transfer data. To request access to the IGB building, please fill out the IGB Entry Request Form.
Training pages can be found here.
Collaboration
In addition to the typical fee for training and instrument time, collaborations with the core facilities staff can be beneficial in the development of unique methods or capabilities. Publications containing work performed in the core facilities should use these guidelines for acknowledging the core facilities. Download a copy of our brochure.
The IGB Core cooperates with the following facilities on campus to provide an extensive selection of instrumentation to campus researchers:
Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center
The Illinois Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center (CBC) and IGB’s integrated suite of next-gen instrumentation is available for users to conduct cutting-edge Omics analyses within the three-dimensional (3D) structural, compositional and formational history of any given sample.
Samples can be composed of tissues, cells, or a combination including biomineral deposits (e.g., bones, teeth, ectopic calcification). The IGB Core Facility provides 3D micro-CT x-ray structural scans at a resolution of 3-100 microns (depending on sample size, shape and composition), coupled with micron-scale Raman characterization of the mineralogical composition of embedded biomineral deposits. High-quality histology sections and petrographic thin sections can be strategically prepared and further interrogated using optical and electron microscopes available within the IGB Core Facility.
Analysis of these samples are done through the DNA Services, Cytometry and Microscopy to Omics (CMtO), and High Performance Computing Bioinformatics (HPCBio) facilities within the CBC, able to conduct cell cytometry analysis and sorting, 10X Genomics Visium CytAssist spatial transcriptomics and proteomics from total mRNA within original 3D tissue and biomineral structure (bridging histology and genomics), and 10X Genomics Chromium high-throughput or deep single cell RNA-Seq.