Category Archives: Confocal Microscopy

Immunofluorescent Microscopy

West Nile Virus in HEK cells 24 hours post infection, 10x magnification. Green is a FITC label on a cytoskeleton marker and red is Cy3 labeling of West Nile Virus. Note viral exclusion from the nucleus. Image by KD Shives.

Today is exciting because I get to do two things.

1: Post the first successful images of West Nile virus infectined cells that I took on my own and

2: Give a basic explanation one of the most visually impressive techniques at our disposal: immunofluorescent microscopy.

For those of you not familiar with fluorescent microscopy this is a very basic image taken with only two fluorophores, or dyes, to color the image. In this image the green color is from FITC and the red comes from Cy3.

So how is it that I can make images that look like this? How do you target the dye to only one part of the cell? Why is all of the cell green and only some parts are red? What is the yellow? Read on for the answers… Continue reading Immunofluorescent Microscopy