UCLA

Sheet Illumination microscopy is a well developed tool in the bio-imaging community due to many inherent advantages. Increased photonic efficiency allows for lower power light sources to be used, which in turn reduce phototoxic damage at the sample over time. High fidelity, high SNR data can be collected from these systems due to their optical sectioning capabilities, and as such, many have been designed to operate within a limited parameter space. These instruments often follow traditional design logic, for specialization in one imaging condition, to observe only a single type of scientific data. This mentality yields high resolution results for a particular class of data, yet is limited in terms of flexibility. Here, the design and development of a user-configurable light sheet microscope is discussed, which uses a spatial phase modulator to dynamically shape and optimize the incident light sheet to perform highly in a number of temporal and spatial scales. The result is a general purpose microscopy platform for the observation of many biological phenomena.