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Omnidirectional microscopy

Nature Methods volume 9, pages 656–657 (2012)Cite this article

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In toto imaging of living embryos has now become much faster. Light-sheet illumination and fluorescence detection with four objective lenses provide complete coverage of large samples in a snap.

In a microscope, a single slice of an intact fluorescently labeled specimen can be imaged by illuminating the sample with a thin laser light sheet from the side. This arrangement using two orthogonal objective lenses is known as light-sheet microscopy1 or selective-plane illumination microscopy (SPIM)2. A three-dimensional image of the sample is acquired at high speed with minimal phototoxicity by moving the sample through the sheet. Despite SPIM's good penetration in light-scattering tissue, it has remained mandatory to carefully rotate and image thicker samples from multiple sides to capture their entire volume. Now Krzic et al.3 and Tomer et al.4 each present a setup that eliminates the time-consuming rotation of specimens required by SPIM. They combined a fixed set of four lenses for illumination and detection with the power of real-time image fusion to reconstruct an entire Drosophila melanogaster embryo in half a minute.

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Figure 1: Microscopes with multiple objective lenses provide complementary views of the same sample for in toto imaging and real-time developmental biology studies.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michael Weber and Jan Huisken are at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), Dresden, Germany,

    Michael Weber & Jan Huisken

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  1. Michael Weber
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  2. Jan Huisken
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Correspondence to Jan Huisken.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Weber, M., Huisken, J. Omnidirectional microscopy. Nat Methods 9, 656–657 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2022

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