Tissue Culture on the Microscope Stage

Luigs&Neumann offers a new developed, miniaturised cell culture chamber for microscopic visualisation of cells under tissue culture conditions. A tissue culture dish with glass bottom for cell culture gets fixed to a teflon coated aluminium chamber and afterwards adapted to a metal plate which can be mounted to the microscope stage of inverse microscopes of different companies (Zeiss, Leica, Olympus etc). The temperature of this chamber, together with the objective used for observation, is thermoregulated from room-temperature up to 370°C. The inside of the chamber can be controlled from the top via a heatable glass window. Mixtures of three gases (O2, N2, CO2) can be composed as required by valves and – after moistening at 37°C in a separate chamber – used for gas supply of the cultured cells. All parts of this observation chamber can get disinfected. Long term observations until the medium change after 2-3 days are possible. The cell culture chamber was successfully applied in the publication of Liu, Berchner-Pfannschmidt et al. (PNAS 101,4302-4307 2004).