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The first commercial ultra-high resolution microscope using structured illumination developed at UC San Francisco (UCSF) by researchers funded by the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) and built by high-end research equipment maker Applied Precision is now in operation at the Oak Park Research Building at the Sacramento campus of UC Davis.
SACRAMENTO, CA – June 09, 2008 – Scientists at the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) and UC San Francisco (UCSF), working with engineers from Applied Precision (Issaquah, WA), have installed the first commercial version of the world's highest resolution wide-field light microscope at CBSTs headquarters at the Sacramento campus of UC Davis. A prototype microscope, dubbed OMX for Optical Microscopy eXperimental, has been developed over the last five years by researchers working at UC San Francisco (UCSF) led by Professor John Sedat in a long-term collaboration with Professor David Agard.
"OMX is a breakthrough technology in microscopy because it overcomes a long-standing barrier, the diffraction limit of light, to significantly increase the resolution of light microscopes," said CBST director Dennis Matthews. "The implications for medicine are profound. It's clear that the foundations of disease lie far deeper in cell structures than we can currently observe. With OMX, it is possible to see those cellular structures and how they 'talk' in real time. Our UC Davis researchers will now be able to better define disease processes and, ideally, find clues to reversing those processes as well."
For decades, many journals and textbooks have referred to the diffraction limit as an insurmountable barrier. However, an imaging technology called Structured Illumination (SI) -- recently invented by Mats Gustafsson working as post-doctoral researcher with Sedat and Agard and colleagues at UCSF -- has enabled scientists to overcome this limit. In SI, the object to be imaged is illuminated by a specific pattern of light that looks much like a bar code, rather than a uniform field of light like that from a lamp. This bar code-like pattern of light will produce unfocused – or moiré -- patterns that can be resolved by the microscope. Sophisticated software algorithms reconstruct a three-dimensional ultrahigh resolution image from multiple individual images generated with the illumination pattern at different orientations and translations.
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