PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Pedro Almada
AU  - Pedro M. Pereira
AU  - Siân Culley
AU  - Ghislaine Caillol
AU  - Fanny Boroni-Rueda
AU  - Christina L. Dix
AU  - Romain F. Laine
AU  - Guillaume Charras
AU  - Buzz Baum
AU  - Christophe Leterrier
AU  - Ricardo Henriques
TI  - Automating multimodal microscopy with NanoJ-Fluidics
AID  - 10.1101/320416
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 320416
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/14/320416.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/14/320416.full
AB  - Fluorescence microscopy can reveal all aspects of cellular mechanisms, from molecular details to dynamics, thanks to approaches such as super-resolution and live-cell imaging. Each of its modalities requires specific sample preparation and imaging conditions to obtain high-quality, artefact-free images, ultimately providing complementary information. Combining and multiplexing microscopy approaches is crucial to understand cellular events, but requires elaborate workflows involving multiple sample preparation steps. We present a robust fluidics approach to automate complex sequences of treatment, labelling and imaging of live and fixed cells. Our open-source NanoJ-Fluidics system is based on low-cost LEGO hardware controlled by ImageJ-based software and can be directly adapted to any microscope, providing easy-to-implement high-content, multimodal imaging with high reproducibility. We demonstrate its capacity to carry out complex sequences of experiments such as super-resolved live-to-fixed imaging to study actin dynamics; highly-multiplexed STORM and DNA-PAINT acquisitions of multiple targets; and event-driven fixation microscopy to study the role of adhesion contacts in mitosis.