In 2012, the Moore Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute devised a plan to address providing access to highly advanced pre-commercial imaging technology to the broader scientific community. The technology was developed at Janelia, the research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The plan called for the creation of a pre-commercial, open-access platform that houses emerging imaging technologies and makes such technologies available to those who could benefit from them. What transpired is the Advanced Imaging Center.
The center has three main objectives:
- Ease collaboration between microscope developers and a wide range of users, thereby allowing the developers to evaluate and improve their inventions;
- Provide an avenue for accessing these microscopes well before they become commercially available; and
- Open access to researchers in the fields that are conventionally not well served by advanced microscopy.
Over the next five years, the Advanced Imaging Center is poised to expand its operation and instrument portfolio in ways that will achieve a significant enhancement of their vision and objectives.
“The Advanced Imaging Center provides a truly unique resource for scientists around the world to further their research with some of the most advanced microscopes ever developed."Gary Greenburg, program officer, Moore Foundation
The center will consider retiring some of the existing microscopes from the current line-up. Also, some of the current instruments will be upgraded or duplicated, including building a new and substantially improved lattice light sheet microscope (LLSM) with adaptive optics that will remove aberrations such as light scattering when imaging with greater penetration depth. This will allow the center to achieve a better balance among their instruments.