Annual Subscription to Bitplane Imaris Software Maintenance

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation’s leading medical researchagency and the primary Federal agency whose mission is to seek fundamentalknowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application ofthat knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability,conducting, supporting and making medical discoveries that improve people’shealth and save lives. The mission of The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is to catalyze the generation of innovative methods and technology that will enhance the development testing and implementation of diagnostics and therapeutics across a wide range of human disease and conditions. The National Institutes of Health National Center for the Advancement of Translational Science is in need of annual maintenance for existing Imaris software packages, which are used for the scientific analysis of fluorescence microscopy three-dimensional image stack data. The Imaris software is required for meeting project milestones of our Stem Cell Translation Laboratory (SCTL). Ongoing projects on establishing optimum culture conditions for stem cells and their directed differentiation to cells of neural and hepatocyte lineages require quantitative analysis of cell morphology and tracking cell proliferation and differentiation. Imaris software is an essential tool for NCATS to analyze images acquired across a broad selection of microscope platforms and to extract quantitative information from these image data. It is imperative that NCATS maintains this software and apply all available upgrades to it annually to facilitate the cutting edge research taking place in Stem Cell technology

Ongoing research projects in SCTL focus on understanding molecular mechanisms regulating stem cell pluripotency and their multi-lineage differentiation capabilities with a focus on defining optimum culture conditions for maintaining pluripotent stem cells and their conversion to homogeneous and mature population of differentiated cells. To achieve these aims, high throughput screening is employed to identify mechanisms/small molecules that aid in single cell cloning of stem cells. In addition, detailed high-resolution analysis of intermediate cell types during conversion of stem cells to differentiated cell types is being carried out to better understand regulators of directed differentiation. These projects will facilitate stem cell based drug discovery and disease modeling in addition to meeting project milestones.