How is CAMiLoD Empowering Researchers With Their Advanced Microscopy Services?

| Researchers Being Trained At CAMiLoD | Facility Located Under the Faculty of Dentistry

When it comes to innovation and scientific research, one can arguably say that both dynamics go hand in hand. Innovation and technology are some dynamic aspects which constantly keep on evolving and growing. Which as a result, are allowing researchers to address and solve complex scientific issues and thus, enhance their overall scope of research. In the same manner, CAMiLoD - The Collaborative Advanced Microscopy Laboratories of Dentistry was established in 2019, with the purpose of enabling researchers of all stripes, to have access to contemporary technologies and advanced microscopy that are otherwise inaccessible.

Since research is a process that requires dynamic tools that are up to date with the current

standards of the scientific community, CAMiLoD has hence, invested heavily in acquiring some of the world's most advanced microscopy which are accompanied by innovative image analysis softwares and technologies.

• First Facility in Canada to offer Dedicated Image Analysis Services

• University of Toronto's New & Core Imaging Facility

• Scientific & Microscopy Expertise

• Integrated Environment (Cell Culture & Microscopy Services)

• Houses the Latest Microscopy e.g. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)

• Experts at CAMiLoD, provide interactive and customized training to researchers

• Quantitative Image analysis and Highest standards in Data Quality

• Render Innovative Softwares and Technologies intended to enhance live cell imaging

• Specialized Microscopy Training & Customized Image Analysis Workshops

• Biosafety Level 2 Facility

• Online Training & Workshops Hosted by Industry Experts/Analysts

• Networking Events hosted By world renowned scientists

• Various Microscopy courses for researchers/students

1. Graduate Students/ Post Graduate Students from any institution

2. Researchers

3. Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical startups/companies

4. Or anyone who is in need of microscopy equipment and imaging expertise

5. The Facility is open to the entire research community

• Biomaterials and Biomedical Imaging

• Microbiology

• Connective Tissue and Regenerative Medicine

• Oral Pathology and Cancer

• Pain and Neuroscience

• And all other Life-science areas

CAMiLoD is not only open to a particular faculty, it is open to the entire research community and endeavours to collaborate and partner up with Biopharma startups to empower the scientific research community.

Are you a researcher or student, within the Medicine, Dentistry, Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience, Biology, or any other related field and are working on a research project ?

GET IN TOUCH WITH ONE OF OUR EXPERTS NOW! DISCUSS YOUR RESEARCH AND MICROSCOPY NEEDS & HOW CAMiLoD CAN HELP BY EMAILING AT camilod@utoronto.ca

Tutorial: Guidance for Quantitative Confocal Microscopy

In case you’re looking for some light reading through this period of isolation, check out the following Nature Protocols paper that recently came out: “Tutorial: Guidance for Quantitative Confocal Microscopy”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-020-0313-9

Enjoy,

Your CAMiLoD team

WELCOME TO CAMILOD

(article from https://www.dentistry.utoronto.ca/news/welcome-camilod )

This week, with a full day symposium and workshop, the Faculty of Dentistry officially opened the doors of its new imaging facility to members of the research community. 

“We wanted to collectively pool our equipment and make it useable for the entire community,” says university professor Boris Hinz, who spearheaded the project. Housed in Dentistry’s newly renovated research laboratories, CAMiLoD is where investigators of all stripes can rent time on some of the world’s best microscopy equipment to further their research. 

"We wanted to collectively pool our equipment and make it useable for the entire community."

And the microscopy catalogue reads like a scientist’s paradise: looking to get up close with living cells and see them contract? The microscopy experts at Dentistry might recommend using the specialized upright confocal microscopes with water-dipping lenses. To view living cells in multiple positions over time, you might try to various Epiflourescence microscopes with fully automated Motorized Stage and on-stage incubation. Or do 3D imaging with living or fixed specimen with two scanning confocal microscope “workhorses,” the Leica SP8 and Zeiss LSM 800. But to see small surface structures, try the Hitachi Scanning FlexSem. Want to “see” forces at work? There’s the “Nanowizard 4” Atomic Force Microscope combined with correlative optical imaging. CAMiLoD even boasts a “Ferrari” of imaging products: the Zeiss LSM 880 Airyscan, allowing users to see their samples in 4D at high speed and sub-diffraction resolution. 

Hinz hopes the labs will offer users more than imaging, though. Embedded within their existing services — light, force, and electron microscopy, as well as histology and image data analysis —CAMiLoD hopes to offer those working with hard-to-transport samples the option of using the shared cell culture and flow cytometry labs. To accommodate this service, CAMiLoD has also hired an imaging analyst, Joao Firmino, who can assist users of the facility with image post-processing and quantitative analysis. 

“Pretty pictures are great but not enough,” says Firmino. “You need objective, quantitative data to get into the high-impact journals. We are here to help with this.”

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“We hope this fully integrated approach —offering both cell culture and imaging —will be an asset to our research partners and students everywhere,” says Hinz. “Our team, which is coordinated by CAMiLoD manager Dhaarmini Rajshankar, has the technological and biological expertise to address your scientific problems,” he says. 

“CAMiLoD is a creation that truly aligns with, and furthers, our Faculty’s vision to improve health by advancing dentistry through inspired leadership, innovation, and excellence in education, research and practice,” said dean Daniel Haas in a speech to kick off the symposium. 

Thanking Hinz for his leadership, Haas added, “With CAMiLoD, faculty, students, and industry partners can come to the Faculty from all over the world to further their research, laying the ground for scientific and clinical collaborations, innovations and breakthroughs.

Interested in visiting CAMiLoD? Visit the website: https://www.camilod.ca

Images: registrants tour CAMiLoD, courtesy Jeff Comber