Damaging laser illumination

Laser Illumination in Live Cell Microscopy: Scattering and Structured Illumination

Two types of laser illumination in live cell microscopy with a focus on the sample or in the aperture plane of the microscope objective lens are distinguished. For the second case two examples are described, namely light scattering microscopy with angular resolution and Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) with two interfering laser beams. Appropriate applications include morphological stud...

Speckle-free laser imaging using random laser illumination.

Many imaging applications require increasingly bright illumination sources, motivating the replacement of conventional thermal light sources with bright light-emitting diodes, superluminescent diodes and lasers. Despite their brightness, lasers and superluminescent diodes are poorly suited for fullfield imaging applications because their high spatial coherence leads to coherent artefacts such a...

Beyond photobleaching, laser illumination unbinds fluorescent proteins.

Confocal and two-photon fluorescence microscopy techniques using genetically encoded fluorescent probes are widely used in cell biology. Beyond the common problems of photobleaching and phototoxicity, we present evidence that photounbinding also has the potential to compromise such methods, especially in quantitative studies. We show that laser intensities within excitation regimes typical for ...

Phase-randomized laser illumination for microscopy.

A simple apparatus is described that phase randomizes the output of a continuous argon ion laser, so that it may be used as a source of high intensity, monochromatic light for microscopy. The phase-randomizing device can be used with any laser, polarized or unpolarized, and of any desired power output and wavelength, including dye lasers for spectral studies. The randomizing system can be adapt...

Endpoint Management: Non-damaging Laser Therapy of the Macula