Collaborations between industry and academic organisations are vital for focusing novel scientific discoveries into real world applications – including LED microscope lighting. In fact, CoolLED wouldn’t even exist without this type of partnership, having emerged as a spin-off division from the company Custom Interconnect Limited (CIL) and the University of Southampton. More recently, our collaboration with Dr Peter Tinning at The University of Strathclyde led to the creation of a high-performance 340/380 nm LED Illumination System for Fura-2 ratiometric calcium imaging – which is now known today as the CoolLED pE-340fura!
Working closely with academia is important to us, and together with Medical Research Scotland, we currently sponsor another PhD student at the University of Strathclyde in Professor Gail McConnell’s research group. Mollie McFarlane is approaching the end of her PhD, and you can find out more about what this involves from when she spoke to us about her project: “Investigating 280 nm LEDs in biomedical optical imaging”. We are excited to announce she has recently had a second paper accepted in IOPscience, entitled “Enhanced fluorescence from semiconductor quantum dot-labelled cells excited at 280 nm”.
The research paper explores the potential application of LEDs at the 280 nm wavelength when used with semiconductor quantum dots. In particular, the authors compare the excitation of quantum dots at 280 nm compared to 365 nm and find improved performance in several parameters when using the 280 nm LED.
We can’t wait to learn more about her project when she visits the CoolLED Andover office this summer to learn extra skills from engineering to marketing – helping her on the way to a successful career.