ADAPTIVE OPTICS: Fluorescent microspheres enable adaptive-optics microscopy

摘要

Adaptive optics has tantalized researchers looking for ways to image through thick biological tissue--but the approach is not straightforward. Now a group of researchers in California has developed a technique for directly measuring the inherent aberrations. Biological microscopy of unfixed samples typically cannot capture high-quality live images that are more than 30 (mu)m beneath the plasma membrane because of changes in the refractive index imposed by tissue composition. However, many important processes (such as stem-cell division, neurogenesis, and the key developmental events following fertilization) occur in deep tissue, so overcoming this limitation would give a huge boost to biological and biomedical investigations.