Environmental Control Chambers
ImCubator Cooled and Heated Chamber
Heated Environmental Chamber (28C / 50C temperature range with optional CO2)
Extended Temperature Range Chamber (14C / 50C temperature range with optional CO2)
Environmental Control Products
Heated Environmental Chamber
(28 – 50C temperature range with optional CO2)
Our competitively priced Environmental Control Chambers are custom built to fit Upright or Inverted Widefield microscopes as well as complete systems (e.g. CLSM, MPLSM, SDCM etc). They provide whole microscope incubation, which is ideal for long time lapse studies in living cells. The whole system enclosure provides temperature stability across the microscope, reducing temperature fluctuations, limiting thermal focus drift and eliminating vibrational artefacts from airflow in the room. Customer sites also report improvements to imaging experiments in fixed specimens due to the at-stage stability provided by the environmental enclosure. Designs can incorporate custom entry points for sample manipulation during experiments.
Our heated chambers enable users to select a range of temperatures from 28C to 50C, ideally suited for Mammalian (37.5C) Drosophila (29C) or Yeast cell (30C) work. Clean filtered air is fed to the chamber through an isolated pump unit. Our optional CO2 control unit provides humidified gas to the sample. Temperature stability across the temperature range is achieved in under 30 minutes.
Chambers are available in clear Perspex for ease of viewing, or Black Perspex for light critical experiments (e.g. quantitative fluorescence, photon counting etc)
Extended Temperature Range Chamber
(14 – 50C temperature range with optional CO2)
For experiments requiring below ambient temperature, we offer a cooling system that provides filtered air to the sample at user defined temperatures between 14 and 50C. This provides all the advantages of our Heated Environmental Chamber (above) as well as the option to lower the whole system temperature to 12C below Ambient. This has proved particularly useful for imaging C.Elegans (16C) and Marine Worms (14C), and Xenopus (18C) and, unlike many stage top cooling systems, has the benefit of providing access for sample manipulation with no additional set up time.
An added advantage of the Extended Temperature Range Chamber is in applications in high ambient temperature environments (e.g. tissue culture, equipment rooms etc) or labs with sub-optimal air handling. The system will maintain a constant temperature across the sample, stage and microscope in circumstances where the external room temperature fluctuates. This has provide invaluable in sites running automated high throughput or long time lapse live imaging experiments in areas where room heating or cooling is switched off out of hours to reduce energy costs. Temperature stability across the temperature range is achieved in under 30 minutes, allowing a wide range of experiments to be performed on the same day on live samples with significantly different environmental requirements.
Temperature Control Unit Only
We can modify most existing chambers to fit our temperature control units. In the event that you require extended temperature ranges or have a failed heater unit that requires replacement, we can modify your existing chamber to reduce the cost of upgrade.