A volunteer and collaborative effort to bring information about shared microscopy facilities to the University of Arizona and the community.

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Did You Know That?

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What about Lightsheet microscopy? 

The UA does not currently have a lightsheet microscope in any of the core facilities. Lightsheet microscopy has a number of advantages over confocal microscopy for certain types of samples, but there are also disadvantages to this technique. There are a quite a few ways to design a lightsheet instrument, all of them usually end up with some compromises, trading one thing for another. It is highly unlikely that just one instrument would be able to satisfy all the research needs on campus.

Another issue is that a lightsheet microscope can easily generate several terabytes worth of data per day and that data will most likely need post-processing. 

Research areas where lightsheet microscopy would be helpful:

  • Developmental biology of live (small) organisms
  • Fast neural imaging in 3D (live samples)
  • 3D tracking of single live cells/molecules
  • High speed 3D imaging of large fixed, cleared samples 

Global Bioimaging sponsored a 2021 seminar (~48min) by Dr. Hari Schroff that reviews the history of lightsheet microscopy, the various technical implementations, and their strengths & weaknesses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J4FYR3dEHY