Lighting Up Biology

Imagine shining a torch into a dark room. To uncover everything inside you’d need to painstakingly scan left to right, up and down. Now imagine an entire wall of light slicing through the room – suddenly you can see a lot more in a single glimpse. That’s the difference between traditional microscopy and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). But LSFM has its drawbacks. Samples must be positioned at 90° and special microscopy equipment is needed. Now researchers present a type of LSFM called oblique plane microscopy (OPM) which they adapted with a new setup. This allowed samples to be positioned flat, any standard upright microscope to be used and more detailed images to be captured. The team showcased how this new approach could capture complex biological processes, such as the immune cell pictured grabbing hold of a target cell to destroy it.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Video from work by Etai Sapoznik and colleagues
• Department of Cell Biology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, November 2020