An integrated confocal and magnetic resonance microscope for cellular research.

Complementary data acquired with different microscopy techniques provide a basis for establishing a more comprehensive understanding of health and disease at a cellular level, particularly when data acquired with different methodologies can be correlated in both time and space. In this Communication, a brief description of a novel instrument capable of simultaneously performing confocal optical and magnetic resonance microscopy is presented, and the first combined images of live Xenopus laevis oocytes are shown. Also, the potential benefits of combined microscopy are discussed, and it is shown that the a priori knowledge of the high-resolution optical images can be used to enhance the boundary resolution and contrast of the MR images.

MAVIS: an interactive visualization tool for computational chemistry calculations in a distributed networked environment.

This paper describes the software package, MAVIS (Molecular Animation and VI-sualization System), which was developed as a collaborative project between the University of Manchester Department of Chemistry and the Manchester Visualization Centre as a tool for the visualization of chemical systems and their properties and for the generation, submission, monitoring and study of results from calculations in a networked computing environment. MAVIS has been developed using AVS, a general visualization environment, as a suite of modules which can be extended with relative ease. Using the AVS system gives the application the power and flexibility of a general system with no requirement for the programmer to understand many of the complexities involved in modern image rendering systems and allowing them to concentrate upon the features of the functionality and the user interface. It also allows the code to be as portable between platforms as the AVS package itself and so it is available on a wide range of systems.