The mission of the National Center for X-ray Tomography (NCXT) is to operate and maintain a high performance soft X-ray tomographic imaging facility that can explore and solve technically challenging problems at the frontiers of whole cell quantitative structural cell biology. The NCXT provides the scientific community access to a state-of-the-art soft x-ray microscope that allows expert and non-expert researchers to image native state biological specimens. We also make available a fully-equipped biological laboratory with a cryo-fluorescence microscope for correlative imaging studies.

The soft X-ray microscope (XM2) is located at the Advanced Light Source Synchrotron (ALS) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). The NCXT staff are members of the University of California at San Francisco Department of Anatomy.

The NCXT is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Mature Synchrotron Resource, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER).