New Achievement from Xi'an Jiaotong University: Microscope Sees Through 2.4 mm of Living Tissue
Recently, a team led by Professor Lei Ming of Xi'an Jiaotong University developed a new type of optical-sectioning structured illumination microscopy system that successfully enables a microscope to "see through" living tissue as deep as 2.4 millimeters. The findings were published in the international academic journal The Innovation.
Optical-sectioning structured illumination microscopy (OS-SIM) images quickly and has low phototoxicity, giving it clear overall advantages for live observation, but it has long had one weakness—difficulty seeing clearly into thick tissue, with imaging depth usually only a few tens of micrometers. Lei Ming's team developed a new technique called HT-SHiLo: it extracts reliable low-frequency structural information from two fringe-patterned images and then fuses it with the fine edge details of a widefield image—in effect adding an "intelligent noise reducer" to the microscope.
Measured data show that the new technique can boost the image signal-to-noise ratio by about 10 decibels and directly double imaging depth. When used to observe a cleared mouse brain, it achieved a penetration depth of 2.4 millimeters; whether imaging the densely packed neurons of the mouse brain, the clock neurons that regulate circadian rhythms in the fly brain, or the fine structures of human colon organoids, the clarity is unprecedented. The technique has so far been validated on a wide range of biological samples—including mouse brain tissue, Drosophila nerves, human organoids, and mitochondria and migrasomes in live cells—demonstrating broad applicability.
In vivo imaging of thick tissue has long been an important direction in life science research. This achievement provides a powerful tool for deep-tissue observation in fields such as neuroscience and developmental biology, and further expands the application space for optical microscopes in live research.
(This article was compiled from a report by China Science Daily, reposted by Sina News as "New Microscope Sees Through 2.4 mm of Living Tissue." Original link: https://k.sina.cn/article_7517400647_1c0126e4705908f2hy.html. Copyright belongs to the original author.)