Coupling SIM and a Confocal?

Andrew York from the NIH has done this, and is reporting good results thus far. Interesting technique! I’m curious how the overall sensitivity of the instrument is, but the examples posted thus far look great!

PDF  – Google Code SiteNature Methods

 

 


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2 responses to “Coupling SIM and a Confocal?”

  1. Andrew York Avatar

    The emission path has very few optics (objective, dichroic, tube lens, emission filter), and the computational ‘pinholes’ are big compared to what a spinning-disk confocal uses, so the sensitivity is pretty good in my experience. Of course, we need pretty good signal-to-noise to get good deconvolution results, but we’ve had good results with most GFP-type samples we’ve tried. If you’re near Bethesda, feel free to get in touch and bring some samples by.

    The real drawback to our implementation is our excitation path is inefficient. We get around this by using a big laser, but I can imagine more efficient ways to deliver light (microlens array with galvo scanning, for example).

    1. Austin Avatar
      Austin

      Thanks for commenting Andrew! Awesome rig!!!
      -Austin