Cellgraph for Live Cell Imaging to all researchers exploring the frontier of gene expression in living cells, tissues, organisms etc.

ATTO Cellgraph is a powerful instrument to capture the living cell images expressing a specific gene marked with bioluminescent proteins under    long-term culture.

AB 3000B Cellgraph

Advanced Features of ATTO Cellgraph

ATTO Cellgraph provides a variety of advanced features to serve living cell studies;

• The ultrasensitive cooled and back-illuminated EMCCD (Electron Multiplying CCD) offers single photon sensitivity, certified with a patented procedure to measure total luminescence intensity as photon counts.
• The incubation system enables long-term culture under controlled temperature and 5% carbon dioxide gas circulation.
• The multicolor detection system is equipped for multi reporter assay with up to 2 different color filters, which enhances sensitivity to extra weak bioluminescence and gives an internal standard basis.
• Versatile image capturing modes include; time-lapse capture at user-set interval, z-stepping mode to optimize Z-stage position (focal plane), switching mode to capture in a dark view and an illuminated view (a luminescent image and a bright field image) alternately.
• Powerful tools for data analysis, editing, and presentation are also provided, i.e. grid measurement at view areas divided into the lattice of user-specified size, spot (ROI) measurement at user-selected areas of a chosen shape (ellipse, rectangle, polygon, or spline curve) and sizes, a movie maker converting time-lapse images into a movie file of AVI format.

Living cell activities are regulated by the complex gene expression networks, which have been analyzed and illuminated with varieties of reporter gene methods using fluorescent proteins (GFP etc.) and /or  bioluminescent proteins (firefly luciferase etc.).

Luciferases offer some advantages over fluorescent proteins, i.e. minimizing phototoxic effects causing damage to living cells, higher  S/N without undesirable auto fluorescence background emission or  scatter generated by intracellular components.

Luciferase markers are also   advantageous in long-term (up to several days) assay of living cells due to relatively low cytotoxicity of the substrate luciferin.

Applications of ATTO Cellgraph AB-3000B

• ATTO Cellgraph has a huge potential to serve various fields of researches focussing gene expression in living cells, tissues, organisms; i.e. studies on chronobiology, development, cell differentiation, drug design, cancer, etc.
• An original paper by Hoshino, H. et al, which refers to ATTO Cellgraph, has been published on Nature Methods in August.

Hoshino, H., Nakajima, Y., and Ohmiya, Y., Luciferase-YFP fusion tag with enhanced emission for single-cell luminescence imaging. Nature Methods. 4(8), 637-639 (2007) [NM] / [PubMed]

ATTO Cellgraph AB-3000B is an imaging system designed to detect  extremely weak bioluminescent signals from a single cell. In combination with luciferase markers, ATTO Cellgraph can visualize the cell dynamics  time dependent changes of transcriptional activities in individual cells and localization to inner cell components (organelles).