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I might not be yet, but maybe someday soon.  It’s now really easy for me to do this, and I can’t figure out if it’s just having had more experience or whether I did some magic to the slides that is making them cooperate with me.  I’ll post some sample images later.  For now, here’s a cell I took a picture of an could have sworn it was 3D on the screen.

Disclaimer: this is an extremely nerdy post.

First, a bit of background: to examine the location of proteins and stuctures inside of cells, we can fix and then stain those cells with antibodies conjugated to fluorescent molecules or proteins.  To image these cells at a very high resolution, we use the confocal microscope with a UV and/or laser light source.  This microscope is connected to a  computer so that we can make fine adjustments, improve the color balance, and control the laser settings.  We can do more image analysis on other computers not connected to the microscope using a “light” version of the software used to actually run the microscope.

I haven’t been able to do that on my home desktop because the software, ZEN 2008, was incompatible with 64-bit systems, and so I’ve had to do this either at work, or on my laptop.  However, it turns out a new version was recently released, ZEN 2009, which is compatible with 64-bit systems, and works beautifully.  Hooray!

The only downside is that the microscope sees a lot of use, and often, I can only get time to use it during off-peak hours, e.g. not a weekday between 7am and 6pm — like yesterday, 6pm-9pm.  :(

Maybe I’ll generate some nice images from my data at some point and I’ll be able to do something really nerdy and use my own data as my desktop background.