Immunofluorescence

Today‘s biological assays range from cell location and adhesion up to complex angiogenesis and chemotactical assays. For all these research aspects different carrier geometries are required, which are represented by the various ibidi µ-Slides or µ-Dishes.

The labeling of specific antigens or antibodies with fluorescent dyes is the most powerful analytical tool in quantitative cell biology. Any fluorescence protocol consists of four major steps: cultivation, fixation, staining, and subsequent imaging of the cells. All these procedures require multiple washing steps. Finally a small amount of dyes or labeled compounds needs to be added to save valuable reagents.

To meet all these requirements we developed the µ-Slide VI. It is a convenient and time-saving tool which supersedes the tedious handling of glass cover slips. In the µSlide VI, the observation volume is easily filled and rinsed. When samples are mounted, the slides can be individually stacked or stored in standard slide format equipment.

The µ-Slide VI can be used with multichannel pipettes. The required amount of staining solution is reduced to 25 µl. The parallelization on the µ-Slide VI allows to test for example different cell types, different fixation methods or different concentration of the applied dyes or antibodies.

Unlike most plastic materials for cell culture, the ibidi µ-Slides and µ-Dishes are compatible with alcohols, acetone, acids, and para-formaldehyde.

µ-Slides are particularly useful when bacteria or infectious material needs to be mounted. This technique is used as an essential tool, not only in research laboratories, but also in medicine for prognostics, diagnostics, and disease monitoring.

The open µ-Slides are designed to handle cell or tissue samples in parallel. One of our µ-Slides carries 18 wells. This setup allows mounting of 18 different tissue or cell samples while facilitating washing and staining steps. To this end, the ibidi research is aiming for semi-automated and fully automated solutions of cell based assays.

The new 96-well Plate comes with the ibiTreat surface and allows cultivation, fixation and imaging in a high thoughput format. It can provide answers to basic questions about the interaction of biomolecules such as specificity and equilibrium constants.