Self-operators must first pass the exam and set up an account.
Reservation: Users can reserve time slots on "Academia Sinica Facility Reservation System"; time slots can be reserved one month in advance. Cancellations should be made in consultation with the administrator BEFORE the booked time.
Users should arrive at the microscope room within 30 min of the reserved time. If a user is more than 30 min late, the reservation will be cancelled and the user will receive a caution.
To avoid wasting this resource, please check your sample is well prepared before reservation.
The core facility will not be responsible for preparation of tools, media, and drugs for your experiment; please prepare them yourself.
Please bring your own storage device to transfer you data. The core facility is not responsible for data preservation.
II. During use
Please follow the start procedure to set up the instrument.
Before opening the fluorescence lamp and laser power, please ensure that the previous user finished more than 30 min earlier.
Be very careful not to spill media from cultured samples in the microscope. If this does happen, please contact the administrator immediately.
Do not use your own objective immersion medium, and be careful not to contaminate dry objectives when using immersion medium.
During operating, if anything untoward happens, or you find any improper behavior of the previous user, please contact the administrator immediately.
III. After use
Before shuttting down the instrument, please check by phone if the next user will arrive within 30 min. If so, please do not shut down the system.
Please follow the correct shutdown procedure for the instrument.
Please remove your sample, tools, and drugs and keep the desktop clean.
Please fill out the "Usage record book" before leaving.
IV. Penalties for improper use
Users will receive a caution in the following situations:
Actions not following the rules described above.
A qualified user uses his/her account to reserve time for a non-qualified user.
Setup of any personal software or hardware without contacting the administrator.
Penalties:
First time caution: oral caution only.
Second time caution: banned for one month.
Third time caution: permanently banned.
If any user breaks the instrument by not following this standard procedure, his/her PI will be responsible for payment for the repair. Otherwise, the staff of his/her lab. will lose the chance to use this instrument.
Slide samples should use a 0.17 mm thickness coverslip, adequately sealed with nail polish or mounting medium.
Mountable samples for time-lapse experiment: 35-60 mm dish and slide chamber only.
If it is necessary to use a 40x W, 63x Imm., or 100x Oil objective to observe living samples, the button of the culture dish must be 0.17 mm thickness glass.
If it is necessary to use DIC observation mode, the sample container must be made of glass.
Infective, evaporative, radioactive, and other biologically dangerous samples are not permitted in this instrument.
Data publishing:
When you publish the data gained from this microscope, please include this statement in your article Acknowledgements: "We thank Academia Sinica Advanced Optics Microscope Core Facility for microscope imaging technical support. The core facility is funded by Academia Sinica Core Facility and Innovative Instrument Project (AS-CFII-111-208)."
To allow us to track the success of the machine in your projects, please e-mail a PDF file of any published article to the administrator.
