The mesoSPIM (mesoscale selective plane illumination microscopy) project creates open-hardware microscopy platforms for imaging cleared tissue samples. The microscopy setup costs between $170,000 to $240,000 including the optical table and most importantly, the laser itself which will run you between $40,000 to $110,000. This stretches the definition of “On The Cheap”, but the project is […]
Month: March 2019
A Workhorse for 18k: DIY Microscopy with Flexiscope
The Flexiscope is DIY microscope that can be easily converted from upright to inverted configurations in “under 30 minutes”. It’s capable of oblique infrared illumination imaging, multi-channel fluorescent imaging, automated 3D scanning, and even has an electrophysiology configuration. The paper, written by Amy Courtney, Luke Alvey , George Merces, and Mark Pickering which details the […]
Craniobot
Mice studies are ubiquitous in neuroscience labs and require a huge amount of time and expertise. And both of those things cost big $$$ which makes the field less accessible. University of Minnesota scientists Leila Ghanbari and Mathew Rynes (along with a long list of collaborators) have developed an impressive robot which can perform cranial […]
1 Year of Lab On The Cheap!
Today marks one year since the first LabOnTheCheap post. That day was spent taking pictures of equipment around lab, queuing up posts, and trying to figure out twitter (success!) and Instagram (nope, never figured it out). We’ve just put out our 100th tweet, and we have 95 articles up. Over the past twelve months we […]
An Open-Source Plate Reader
Plate readers are instruments which are used to detect properties of samples in microtiter plates, via absorbance, fluorescence, and luminescence. Karol Szymula, Michael Magaraci, Michael Patterson, Andrew Clark, Sevile Mannickarottu, and Brian Chow published a paper in September 2018 detailing the construction and performance of an open-source plate reader. The extensive supplementary materials provide everything you will need, from software to parts list to a […]