Light Sheet Microscopy for Einstein Shared Facility

This proposal seeks funding to purchase the Zeiss Light Sheet 7 microscope for the Neural Cell Engineering and Imaging Core (NCEI) of the Rose F Kennedy Center for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research (IDDR) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Einstein). The NCEI Core has served as a valuable shared facility for Einstein investigators for close to 35 years. During this the Core has received strong financial support from the Kennedy IDDR Center, funded by NIH/NICHD Center grants, the Department of Neuroscience, and the school. In recent years there has been marked increase in development and use of light sheet imaging approaches to biological and biomedical research, facilitating comprehensive evaluations not otherwise easily obtained. This provides unprecedented global perspective to tissue patterning, cellular architectonics, and functional ensembles and long-range connectivity, and can lead to unanticipated new insights. Establishment of a light sheet microscope facility will bring this important technology to the Einstein community for the first time, and meet what has been understandably a significantly growing demand. The ability to rapidly image large intact volumes of tissues and organs will be invaluable to numerous NIH-funded investigators of the IDDR center and of the Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences departments, as well as others. In all cases, the microscope will be transformational in their studies that call for examination of long distance neuronal pathways, volume determinations, labeled specific cell sub-population counts and distributions, and complex mixed cell-type arrays. The research projects have relevance to neurodevelopmental disorders, cognition, addiction, neural plasticity, epilepsy, infanticide, atherosclerosis and vascular remodeling, obesity, and stress and memory. The capabilities provided by the proposed microscope would be a vital asset for Einstein researchers, permitting studies not otherwise readily possible, enhancing productivity and potentiating novel biomedical insights.