Time-Lapse Microscopy Imaging

INTRODUCTION By their very nature, biological systems are dynamic, and a proper understanding of the cellular and molecular processes underlying living organisms and how to manipulate them is a prerequisite to combat diseases and improve human health care. One of the major challenges of current biomedical research, therefore, is to unravel not just the spatial organization of these complex systems, but their spatiotemporal relationships [142,42]. Catalyzed by substantial improvements in optics hardware, electronic imaging sensors, and a wealth of fluorescent probes and labeling methods, light microscopy has, over the past decades, matured to the point that it enables sensitive time-lapse imaging of cells and even single molecules [150,93,166,100]. These developments have had a profound impact on how research is currently being conducted in the life sciences.