Skip to main content
UNC Neuroscience Center

NMC Maintenance Procedures

Weekly Maintenance

At the NMC we perform—at least—weekly maintenance on all of our systems.

We perform the following tasks to ensure optimal performance of our light microscopes:

  • Check and clean objectives.
  • Check and clean eyepieces.
  • Check and clean stages.
  • Verify air table flotation.
  • Perform computer maintenance tasks (virus scans, software updates, purging old data, hard drive checks, etc.).
  • Ensure all consumables (lens paper, immersion oil, ethanol, water, wipes) are available.
  • Verify proper movement of stage in both axes.

In addition to these weekly checks we have historical measurements of laser powers on our confocal and widefield systems, detailed measurements made with beads on some of our high resolution objectives, and can provide tools to perform brightfield and fluorescence flatfielding on any of our systems.

Insurance and Service Contract Coverage

All of our instruments have insurance against catastrophic damage, and the following systems have premium service contracts with their manufacturers, to ensure any problem is solved quickly for our users, as well as to receive timely updates:

  • Olympus FV3000RS confocal
  • Leica SP8X confocal
  • Zeiss LSM 980 confocal
  • Zeiss LSM 710 confocal (hardware replacement cannot be guaranteed due to sunsetting of the model by the manufacturer)
  • Zeiss LSM 780 confocal (hardware replacement cannot be guaranteed due to sunsetting of the model by the manufacturer)
  • Bitplane Imaris image analysis software