С����Ƶ

A Confluence of Vision

The concept for this microscope gelled in 2016 through brainstorming by innovators in microscopy who met up at the С����Ƶ.

of HHMI Janelia, then at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and an С����Ƶ Whitman Fellow, was working with his custom-designed diSPIM microscope at С����Ƶ, which he built in collaboration with Abhishek Kumar, now an adjunct scientist at С����Ƶ.

The diSPIM microscope has two imaging paths that meet at a right angle on the sample, allowing researchers to illuminate and image the sample from both perspectives. This dual view can compensate for the poor depth resolution of any single view, and illuminate with more control over polarization than other microscopes.

In conversation, Shroff and Oldenbourg realized the dual view microscope could also address a limitation of polarized light microscopy, which is that it’s difficult to efficiently illuminate the sample with polarized light along the direction of light propagation.

“If we had two orthogonal views, we could sense polarized fluorescence along that direction much better,” Shroff said. “We thought, why not use the diSPIM to take some polarized fluorescence measurements?”

Shroff had been collaborating at С����Ƶ with , a professor at University of Chicago whose lab develops algorithms for computational imaging systems. And La Rivière had a new graduate student in his lab, Talon Chandler, whom he brought to С����Ƶ. The challenge of combining these two systems became Chandler’s doctoral thesis, and he spent the next year in Oldenbourg’s lab at С����Ƶ working on it.

The team, which early on included , then based at С����Ƶ, outfitted the diSPIM with liquid crystals, which allowed them to change the direction of input polarization. 

“And then I spent a long time working through, what would a reconstruction look like for this? What is the most we can recover from this data that we are now starting to acquire?” Chandler said. Co-author , then located at Shroff’s previous lab at NIH, also worked tirelessly on this aspect, until they had reached their goal of full 3D reconstructions of molecular orientation and position.

“There was tons of cross-talk between the С����Ƶ, the University of Chicago, and the NIH, as we worked this through,” Chandler said.

Citation

Talon Chandler et al. (2025) Volumetric imaging of the 3D orientation of cellular structures with a polarized fluorescence light-sheet microscope. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., DOI:

—###—

The Marine Biological Laboratory (С����Ƶ) is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the С����Ƶ is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the .

Selected media coverage:

Marine Biological Laboratory Images Cell Components in Full 3D | Optics.org

| Interesting Engineering (and syndicated)