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The impact of technology on light microscopy

Nature Cell Biology volume 11, pages S23–S24 (2009)Cite this article

It is a typical day in a modern biomedical research lab. You walk into the microscope room and flip one switch. After a couple of mouse-clicks, your settings are loaded and you are ready to go. After placing and focusing the sample on the stage, one more click starts an automated imaging procedure that will last several hours. You might check in on your experiment from time to time, but the computer's control over all aspects of the system makes intervention unnecessary. When the image collection is complete, you will have a complete annotated data set ready for analysis, and this data set might even be automatically directed to the computer on your desktop.

Light microscopy has come a long way since the first experiments in the seventeenth century by Robert Hooke, who became famous for his elegant drawings of microscopic objects, and by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who was a poor artist and actually had someone else draw as he described what he was seeing through the microscope. In those early days, data reproducibility and quantitative analysis were limited. The steady march of technology has greatly affected light microscopy in many ways, both direct and indirect. The most useful technologies include light sources such as the laser and light-emitting diode (LED), detectors such as the avalanche photodiode and charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, and last, but not least, the computer. Even though these technologies were originally developed for other applications, and as such do not qualify as milestones in microscopy, each has had a huge impact on the field. Because of these technologies, practical use of optical imaging has exploded during the past 100 years, despite the fact that the conceptual basis and design of the microscope has remained almost constant.

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  1. David W. Piston is in the Departments of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, Physics, and Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. dave.piston@vanderbilt.edu,

    David W. Piston

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  1. David W. Piston
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Piston, D. The impact of technology on light microscopy. Nat Cell Biol 11 (Suppl 1), S23–S24 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb1936

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