Bringing Living Cells Into Focus: A View of Inverted Microscopes

Date: March 30, 1998 Author: Jim Kling Tables of Vendors What's really going on here? That question used to puzzle bleary-eyed microscopists as they stared at slides of immobilized cells--dead cells, of course. Then along came the inverted microscope. Its unique design placed the light source above the sample and the magnifying objective below it, allowing these new microscopes to peer into live cells bathed in media. Suddenly, scientists had a new view of the neighborhoods and boroughs occupied

Written byJim Kling

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Date: March 30, 1998
Author: Jim Kling

Tables of Vendors

What's really going on here? That question used to puzzle bleary-eyed microscopists as they stared at slides of immobilized cells--dead cells, of course. Then along came the inverted microscope. Its unique design placed the light source above the sample and the magnifying objective below it, allowing these new microscopes to peer into live cells bathed in media. Suddenly, scientists had a new view of the neighborhoods and boroughs occupied by microtubules, vacuoles, and all the other cellular structures.

Zeiss: Immunofluorescence of human skin cells, triple fluorescence; triple exposure with the single bandpass filter sets cytokeratin filaments (FITC), desmosomes (Texas red) and DNA (DAPI). Increasingly, cell biologists are studying live processes, "the inverted microscope lends itself to observing live material because [cells need] to be in medium or they need to be perfused," says Reinhard Enders, senior technical marketing manager at ...

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