Illumination with a thin sheet of light can be used to generate high-resolution, three-dimensional movies of living cells.
The technique, called plane-illumination microscopy, had been applied to multicellular specimens, but the light sheets were too thick to capture high-resolution images in single cells. Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and his colleagues generated thinner sheets of light using 'Bessel beams' — a special class of narrow, non-diffracting light beams.
The team used the new microscope to produce three-dimensional images of fluorescently labelled subcellular features from stacks of planar images captured at almost 200 planes per second. The stacks were then assembled into movies showing the dynamics of certain features, such as tiny projections called filopodia (pictured), at a resolution of 0.3 micrometres.
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Seeing cells with sheets of light. Nature 471, 268 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/471268a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/471268a
