Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) is a microscopy technique suited to mostly transparent specimens of ~10 mm. OPT requires the collection of a number of images (projections) of a sample taken from different angles. In practice, this means as rotating a sample around an axis in a precise manner. These images can be fed into mathematical […]
GridTape: cutting the cost of serial section Transmission Electron Microscopy systems
GridTape is part of a new system for serial section transmission electron microscopy imaging which excels at high-throughput low-cost nanometer-scale transmission of large volumes. And it’s cheap, for the current price of a comparable multi-beam SEM system, ten grid-tape TEM systems can be built. At first glance the cost sheet looks imposing, but it contains […]
Incu-Stream: Inverted Bright-Field Microscopy and Automated Mechanical Scanning for just $184
Incu-Stream is an open-hardware microscopy setup designed for bright-field cell imaging of incubated microplates. The design is all laid out in a paper written by Güray Gürkan and Koray Gürkan, with nothing hidden in a supplementary packet this time. The system is specifically aimed at creating a microplate compatible inverted bright-field microscope system that can […]
Ytterbium laser for $13,000.
One of the largest obstacles to two-photon DIY microscopy is the acquisition of a pulsed laser system, which generally hits the $100,000 range. Evan Perillo, Justin McCracken, Daniel Fernée, John Goldak, Flor Medina, David Miller, Hsin-Chih Yeh, and Andrew Dunn have a 2016 paper detailing the construction and characterization of a Ytterbium laser at 1060 […]
DIY Fluorescence Smartphone Microscopy
We’ve covered several portable microscopy setups before, including Foldscope, wooden scope, and our favorite these little UV magnifiers. We like the latter so much because it is capable of both white light, and UV light, and we found we were capable of doing a little bit of fluorescence microscopy on it. That’s where a 2017 […]