Description of the RI

The Functional Cell Biology and Immunology Advanced Core Facility (FCBI ACF) and the Single Cell Omics Advanced Core Facility (SCO ACF) are parts of the Hungarian Centre of Excellence for Molecular Medicine (HCEMM) Core Facility Network.

The mission of the ACFs is to provide a range of services tailored to the requirements of HCEMM researchers, while also serving as an EU-level infrastructure, competence and training base, offering its capacities for any Hungarian and EMBL partner researcher and services to external users as well.

The instrumentation of the FCBI ACF includes a state-of-the-art laser scanning confocal microscope, a STORM super-resolution microscope, a scanning electron microscope optimized for biological samples (including array tomography and correlative light and electron microscopy) and a 4-channel FACS cell sorter.

The instrumentation of the SCO ACF includes two high resolution mass spectrometers (MS), several HPLC systems, a Chromium Controller microfluidic device and a well-equipped wetlab supporting sample preparation.

Activities and Services

Services offered by the SCO ACF:

Proteomics services include MS-based protein identification, relative protein quantification, phosphorylation analysis, identification of protein interacting partners using co-immunoprecipitation, protein crosslinking experiments and molecular mass determination of purified single-protein samples. High-pH chromatographic fractionation for comprehensive analysis of complex biological samples is also available. We provide help in study design, perform the sample preparation and data analysis.

The MS-based shotgun Lipidomics service covers comprehensive shotgun Lipidomic analysis with identification and quantification of hundreds of lipid species including principal phospholipid, sphingolipid and neutral lipid classes. The chip-based robotic delivery system ensures cross contamination-free, high throughput measurements from a wide variety of samples including cell cultures, tissues, and biofluids.

The Chromium Controller microfluidic device enables sample partitioning and molecular barcoding at the single cell level using sample sizes up to a few thousand cells. Downstream sequencing and data analysis provides single cell resolution data allowing single cell gene expression, immune or epigenomic profiling of the samples.

Services offered by the FCBI ACF:

Our primary objective is to support research groups with the latest imaging/cytometry techniques and software solutions. Our services range from initial advice on the selection of the most suitable equipment for a project and configuring it, to the final analysis of the imaging/cytometry data.

Our static and dynamic imaging applications include standard widefield and confocal imaging of fixed samples and live cells (up to 4 wavelengths simultaneously), two-color super resolution microscopy based on STORM and PALM techniques, single particle tracking, TIRF (total internal reflection fluorescence) microscopy, array tomography with ATUMtome (semi-automated cutting and imaging of 100-2000 slices with a z-resolution of 30-50 nm and 3D rendering of the images), and correlative light and electron microscopy: a comparative dual (light and electron microscopy) analysis of the same specimen, which is essential for the analytical interpretation of high-resolution electron microscopy images at the cellular level.

FACS-related applications include cell sorting and clustering from fluids and tissues, and marker identification.