ELMILAB services & guidelines

Discuss your imaging project

We ask all people interested in the acquisition of electron microscopic at ELMILAB first to discuss their imaging projects with the ELMIilab team. We will assist you in finding the best-suited approaches and you will get an overview of the possibilities and routines at the facility and the costs arising from its usage. Get in contact at an early planning stage, if you aim to apply for funding for EM work.

Become an ELMILAB user

Before ELMILAB staff can provide services for your project or you start working at ELMILAB you must apply for registration as an ELMILAB user. Please contact the team by email and briefly describe your imaging project and your affiliation.

Self-dependent work of academic users at ELMILAB

Academic users with a background in electron microscopy can perform self-dependent work at ELMILAB. This mode of operation is meant for people who routinely apply electron microscopic methods for their research. After initial training on lab routines, safety regulations, and instruments of interest, users can access the facility and operate the respective instruments under the assistance and advice of ELMILAB staff. The level of support depends on the user's experience and the requirements for safe instrument operation. Fees apply mainly for the usage of instruments and laboratories, and staff time. Extended training of individual users in electron microscopic methods is during routine operation, however, beyond the facility's capacity. This needs special agreements or may form part of collaborations and courses.

Services for research projects and commercial users

Staff is available for doing sample preparation, imaging, and image processing according to users’ requirements at any stage of a running project. This kind of assistance will be charged on an hourly basis. Even whole imaging projects can be conducted as a service by ELMILAB staff. This is standard for the private sector and may also be of interest to academic research groups that are interested in electron microscopic data but do not have the capacity to conduct EM work on their own. ELMILAB will provide you with cost estimation in advance and charge the effective costs after completion of the order. The staff will be in close contact with you on the progress of the project and provide you with raw and processed data and a detailed report after completion.

Teaching

Courses on electron microscopic methods and data analysis are held at ELMILAB at regular intervals.

Scientific collaboration

ELMILAB aims to provide excellent resources for the generation and analysis of electron microscopic data to the benefit of the scientific community and commercial users. Advancement in the field is of critical value for meeting this overall goal. Hence, ELMILAB is open to scientific collaboration on advanced projects and the establishment of new approaches and methods.

Data storage

User data are by default stored on safe storage devices provided by the UiB IT department and are directly accessible to UiB members. For external users, ELMILAB assists in finding adequate solutions for data access and transfer. All users are obliged to transfer obtained data within two weeks to their storage.

Publication of data generated at ELMILAB

When publishing data generated at ELMILAB it is mandatory to mention the support by the Electron microscopic laboratory at the University of Bergen in the acknowledgments. If members of the ELMILAB team contributed significantly to the published work, they should be included in the author list. We ask scientific users to upload representative data sets to publicly available data repositories.