Wide-field light microscope for combined high-speed, high-throughput, and high-resolution analysis of molecular interactions

The University of Turku (for Turku Bioscience) intends to purchase a conventional and broadly versatile wide-field light microscope for combined high-speed, high-throughput, and high-resolution analysis of molecular interactions in large variety of biological specimens ranging from live single cells to fixed thick tissue sections and more. The system to be purchased must include a validated strategy for on-the-fly background subtraction and built in image de-convolution capabilities.

The University of Turku (for Turku Bioscience) intends to purchase a conventional and broadly versatile wide-field light microscope for combined high-speed, high-throughput, and high-resolution analysis of molecular interactions in large variety of biological specimens ranging from live single cells to fixed thick tissue sections and more. The system to be purchased must include a validated strategy for on-the-fly background subtraction and built in image de-convolution capabilities. The setup will be optimized for the following sample types, according to the research strongholds in Turku: I. Zebrafish embryos: development and cancer biology models II. Drosophila larva: organ development and fine structures III. Neurobiology: mouse brain imaging IV. Cleared tissues: neurobiology and immunology research, mouse brain, mouse lymph nodes, thymus V. Cell organoids, spheroids and tumours VI. Live and fixed cells Many of these samples (and especially the thicker samples) have strong out-of-focus background signal that in many instances completely overwhelms the in-focus specific signal. This often makes further analysis by wide-field imaging impossible. While the standard experimental approach in these cases has been to image these more challenging samples on much more technologically demanding (and much more expensive) confocal microscopes, recent image processing approaches has shown that it is also possible to resolve such signals from images that have been acquired on a conventional wide-field microscope. For the purpose of this project, it is thus essential that the microscope system contains efficient and customizable computational methods, so called computational clearing methods, that are highly efficient at distinguishing real molecular signals from background in a live-view format, while also containing additional computational image restoration algorithms, so called image de-convolution, for further image enhancement of raw image data from the effects of diffraction.