The 13^th Microscopy Webinar will take place on November 29^th from 16:00 to 17:00 (Swiss time)

Video recording is HERE.

Speaker:

• Prof. Gail McConnell - Mesolab, Strathclyde (UK)

Title: Optical mesoscopy with the Mesolens
 
Abstract: For more than a century, the design of microscope objectives has been guided by the angular acuity of the human eye. At 4x magnification, this requires a numerical aperture no greater than 0.1 or 0.2, which can be achieved cheaply and easily by simple optical designs. With the advent of confocal microscopy, however, it became apparent that the poor axial resolution of more than 30 microns with low magnification objectives was intolerable for these methods.
 
We have developed an objective with a magnification of 4x and a numerical aperture of just less than 0.5 which we call the Mesolens. The pupil size of the lens is so great that it cannot be used with a conventional microscope frame, so we have built the imaging system around the lens and use either wide-field camera or laser point-scanning detection to create images. We originally specified this lens for mammalian embryology and have shown that it can image every cell of a 6mm-long embryo 3mm thick with sub-cellular resolution if the tissue is cleared appropriately. However, like the original optical microscope, we have found that the Mesolens has a wide range of applications in biomedical research. We will present an overview of the Mesolens technology, some examples of new and emerging applications that use this new instrument, and we will explain how we are now further developing this technology.

Mini bio: Gail McConnell is Professor of Biophotonics at the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Following a first degree in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics (1998) and PhD in Physics from the University of Strathclyde (2002), she obtained a Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2003) and a Research Councils UK Academic Fellowship (2005), securing a readership in 2008 and Chair in 2012. The work in Gail’s group involves the design, development and application of linear and nonlinear optical instrumentation and new methods for biomedical imaging, from the nanoscale to the whole organism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, where she is the current Chair of the Light Microscopy Committee.

 

Image: adult female Drosophila imaged with the Mesolens in point-scanning confocal mode. Colour scale corresponds to different depths in the fly.