Introduction: Microprofiling Setups

Complete setup for automized microprofiling with optical oxygen microsensors (Heavy Stand HS1, Micromanipulator MU1, Oxygen Meter, software Profix)

Within the last decade microsensors became an important tool in an ever growing diversity of research fields. Because microsensors need precise positioning down to 1 µm spatial resolution, microprofiling setups became the standard choice for microsensor applications. Such setups have been successfully applied in:

• biogeochemistry (e.g. marine and freshwater sediments)

• biofilms (e.g. marine phototrophic biofilms)

• microbial mats (e.g. hypersaline cyanobacterial mats)

• microbial communities in extreme environments (hot springs)

• insect physiology (e.g. termite gut physiology)

• plant physiology (e.g. oxygen transport in eelgrass roots)

• human physiology (e.g. kidney, cancer or brain research)

Pyro Science offers microprofiling setups for varying scientific (and financial) demands. Basic setups are manually operated consisting of e.g. Heavy Stand HS1, Micromanipulator MM33, and the oxygen-meter Firesting O2. The advanced setups are controlled by the microprofiling program Profix running on a Windows PC, which operates a motorized micromanipulator (e.g. MU1 with motorized z-axis, MUX2 with motorized z- and x-axis) and reads in data from up to two microsensor modules. Such systems allow complex automized microprofiling applications (e.g. long-term microprofiling at defined time intervals, or automatic transects). Profix has been developed during the last 12 years in close cooperation with leading microsensor research groups. Today it is applied by more than 100 research groups worldwide. The new version Profix 4 is provided by Pyro Science as freeware and comes now with many new features (e.g. automatic transects, automatic µM calculation for oxygen microsenors, interactiv flux calculations on measured profiles, input file generation for the microprofile analysis program PROFILE from Peter Berg).