Nanoimager - hi-rez microscope - but what is it?

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Dubious
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Nanoimager - hi-rez microscope - but what is it?

#1 Post by Dubious » Sat Jan 22, 2022 1:02 am

On my news.google page, I came across this article about the Nanoimager, a high-resolution microscope the size of a toaster that can show things down to the molecular level. Reading the article, though, which is mostly fluff, I still did not know how it worked.

https://endpts.com/a-high-res-microscop ... c-backers/

I found the company's website, which is only slightly more illuminating. The microscope uses lasers, so apparently some kind of scanning microscope. It can do live cell imaging. It uses an Olympus 100x oil objective. It is quite small. I'm still not sure just what it is, however--some wrinkle on a confocal microscope? Maybe someone here knows.

https://oni.bio/

https://oni.bio/community/faqs/

BramHuntingNematodes
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Re: Nanoimager - hi-rez microscope - but what is it?

#2 Post by BramHuntingNematodes » Sat Jan 22, 2022 2:04 am

You get your sample in the right chemicals and blast it with a laser and it starts twinkling. You take a long exposure and run it through some computer algorithms that can figure out the center of where each twinkle is and you got a.superresolution image. So it's a high power lens, a high power laser and I guess a camera
1942 Bausch and Lomb Series T Dynoptic, Custom Illumination

crb5
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Re: Nanoimager - hi-rez microscope - but what is it?

#3 Post by crb5 » Sat Jan 22, 2022 4:53 pm

Breaking the resolution limit of light microscopy has been done in a variety of ways mostly based around the ability to image a single fluorescent dye molecule. This requires the illumination of a small volume to reduce background noise and is usually achieved using confocal or total internal reflection optics (e.g. when the back focal plane of a 1.4 NA objective lens is illuminated at its periphery and the specimen is in water (n=1.33) the light directed towards the sample is totally internally reflected and only fluorophores within around 100 nm of the glass-water surface are excited). The image of a single fluorescent molecule appears as a dot with a Gaussian intensity profile whose width is limited by the wavelength of light (e.g. 500nm/2 = 250 nm). However if enough photons are collected the peak of the Gaussian can be estimated to within a precision of about 10 nm and is the likely position of the molecule itself. In one form of high resolution imaging, fluorescent dyes are used which blink between bright and dark phases. At any one time only a few molecules are in their bright state and these will be spaced several micrometers apart and so they can be resolved from each other and their positions estimated to within 10 nm. As they twinkle between bright and dark states different molecules will be seen and a high resolution image can be built up over a period of several minutes. The method does not need particularly powerful lasers, less than a laser pointer in many cases, but does need a sensitive camera/detector and high quality filters and dichroic mirrors.

BramHuntingNematodes
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Re: Nanoimager - hi-rez microscope - but what is it?

#4 Post by BramHuntingNematodes » Sat Jan 22, 2022 6:50 pm

I don't have much practical exp but it was my understanding that dstorm needs higher power lasers for those real bright fluorophores but the Oni says it has four lasers I guess to accommodate different techniques
1942 Bausch and Lomb Series T Dynoptic, Custom Illumination

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