Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts highlighting Shared Resources available at Sanford-Burnham. Future posts will further explore some of the individual capabilities found in these core facilities.
Suppose you’re a new assistant professor just starting your career at Sanford-Burnham, and you need to perform some high-resolution fluorescence microscopy to finish your first big paper as a principal investigator. How do you afford that $400,000 confocal microscope for the key experiments? For that matter, how does anyone afford a $400,000 microscope? Here’s where Shared Resources saves the day. Just down the stairway sits the Zeiss Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope that Sanford-Burnham’s Cell Imaging facility has thoughtfully provided for you. How did you get so lucky?