Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2022-02-21
Buyer: University of Copenhagen
Country: DK
Contract type: Supplies
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 38515200
Estimated value: 5356777.25 DKK

Technical requirements: Acquisition of a Carl ZEISS Axioscan7, LSM900 with airyscan2 and an AxioVert A1 incl. Fluorescence, phase contrast, DIC
The Core Facility for Integrated Microscopy (CFIM) is an open access microscopy facility that offers state-of-the-art microscopy technologies to life scientists at the faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, from other faculties and for other academic and none-academic research institutions. CFIM is part of the Danish BioImaging network and the Danish node of the ERIC Euro BioImaging.
The two of the main light microscopy applications used by CFIM users are; confocal microscopy, fast airyscan and scanning of slides. CFIM’s Axioscan Z1 is getting old and is used 24/7. Similarly, our LSM900 with airyscan2 is fully booked and time availability is limiting user’s access. For this reasons, CFIM needs to invest in an additional inverted fluorescence confocal microscope. It will enable us to fulfil the demand. It is important that it has the same configuration of the existing system and that it is equipped with the Airyscan detector, which allows us to image with lower light intensity and higher resolution, which is essential for many of the projects/applications. In order to backup and add additional capacity to slide digitalization at CFIM, we aim at purchasing the Axioscan 7. Finally, CFIM needs a widefield microscope for users to check the quality of their slides/cells before they book high-end systems. Here, we plan to include in the package an Axiovert  A1 with phase contrast and DIC.
The Axioscan 7 – is the only system in the market that has the Transfer of Intensity Equation bright field method, Illumination with minimal aperture to create semi coherent light, GPU based digitalization in ccombination with flash illumination. The Axioscan 7 is also equipped with a motorized condenser hardware aperture adaption to selected objective.
The LSM900 with Airyscan is unique as it uses detection technology based on pixel reassignment. The LSM 900 with Airyscan 2 is the only laser scanning confocal microscope that allows us to acquire images with lower laser light intensity and higher resolution. It is a point scanning confocal with super resolution based on pixel reassignment detection technology. This will give an isotropic increase in resolution down 120 nm lateral and 350 nm axial. The new Multiplex mode provides greatly enhanced imaging speed (4x faster) than confocal imaging while providing better resolution and signal to noise. This allows gentle imaging at low laser power for high speed processes and also productive imaging of large fields of view in combination with Tile experiments with enhanced image quality
High resolution scanning microscopy Summary excerpt: A microscope for high-resolution scanning microscopy of a sample, with a spatial resolution which, taking account of the imaging scale, is at least twice as high as a full width at half maximum of the diffraction-limited individual image, to have: a detector array Claimed in EP2825908.
CFIM has in the last years developed strong semi-automatized image acquisition and image analysis pipelines to analyse pathology slides. This includes image acquisition with the axioscan, deep learning based pixel classification and image analysis with ZEN software. For this reason, it is essential for CFIM to purchase a system that can use the same solutions – the Axioscan 7.
CFIM is equipped with a LSM900 with airyscan2 and, it is so heavily used that is limiting service through-put. It is important for CFIM to purchase the same system with the same configuration so that users can use any of the according to availability. Thus, for experiment compatibility (hardware setup) between existing confocal microscope, it is essential to purchase the LSM900 with Airyscan2.
Finally, CFIM is a multimodal microscopy facility that aims at correlating images of the same sample taken with different microscopes. Thus, it is beneficial to include the axiovert into the Carl Zeiss portfolio at CFIM.


Winner: Carl Zeiss A/S
Award value: 5356777.25