IncuCyte™ Live-Cell Imaging System from Essen BioScience

The Essen IncuCyte family of products brings together a more efficient and thorough set of solutions for long-term, live-cell imaging. The IncuCyte imaging method allows you to expand the ways you document and understand cellular growth, behavior, and morphology. In addition, by design, it provides an effective kinetic read-out solution for the next generation of in vitro biological assays.

In a paradigm shift, IncuCyte allows you to place a microscope inside your incubator, taking advantage of an asset you already own as well as eliminating any potential problems that may result from disturbing cells during the observation process. This approach makes long-term kinetic imaging convenient and affordable.

Because the microscope is located inside the incubator, the system is especially well suited to long-term monitoring of cell growth. Control of the system and access to the images and data are enabled from any computer on your local network. With this remote capability and convenience, you can view real-time imaging from conference rooms, offices, or even colleagues’ labs throughout your facility or campus.

The IncuCyte is designed with increased productivity in mind supporting hundreds of standard varieties of cell culture vessels, including 96- and 384-well plates, T-flasks, dishes, and micro-slides. With three configurable trays, you can mix and match multiple vessels and even monitor different experiments running concurrently. Image location and timing of acquisition are controlled by the user, and access to the kinetic image history is supported via an image database and retrieval system.

One of the best features of the IncuCyte system is the intuitive design of the software interface. Based on a client-server methodology, the interface enables you to acquire, access and analyze information from any computer on the local network. The IncuCyte is also designed to make it simple for you to retrieve information either chronologically or by experiment.

Another popular benefit is how easy it is to create movies from your captured images – all of which are exportable in a number of formats. Historically, phase-contrast imaging in 96 and 384-well microplates has been hampered by aberrations caused by the fluid meniscus in the well. HD Imaging, a proprietary imaging format developed by Essen BioScience specifically for IncuCyte, is insensitive to these aberrations. HD imaging greatly enhances phase-contrast imaging in microplates enabling applications such as cell plating quality control and non-labeled proliferation studies.