Parametric Design File and STLs For Apical Imaging Chamber (AIC)

Interactions between individual pathogenic microbes and host tissues involve fast and dynamic processes that ultimately impact the outcome of infection. Using live cell microscopy, these dynamics can be visualized to study e.g. microbe motility, binding and invasion of host cells, and intra-host-cell survival. Such methodology typically employs confocal imaging of fluorescent tags in tumor-derived cell line infections on glass. This allows high-definition imaging, but poorly reflects the host tissue's physiological architecture and may result in artifacts. We developed a method for live-cell imaging of microbial infection dynamics on human adult stem cell-derived intestinal epithelial cell (IEC) layers. These IEC layers are grown in "apical imaging chambers", optimized for physiological cell arrangement and fast, but gentle, differential interference contrast (DIC) imaging. This allows sub-second visualization of both microbial and epithelial surface ultrastructure at high resolution without using fluorescent reporters.

This item holds the CAD design files for the AIC chamber described in van Rijn & Eriksson et al. 2022.

AIC_parametric.FCStd: A parametric design file for FreeCAD (v. 0.19) that specifies the geometry of the Apical Imaging Chamber (AIC).

AIC_bottom_(Meshed).stl: A STL file for use in a 3D printing pipeline, the bottom part of the AIC camber.

AIC_top_(Meshed).stl: A STL file for use in a 3D printing pipeline, the top part of the AIC camber.