Fluorescence and Brightfield Microscopes at an Affordable Price
Fluorescence microscopy is an imaging modality used to visualize specific structures in biological and other physical samples. The objects of interest in the sample (e.g. neurons, blood vessels, mitochondria, etc.) are visualized because fluorescent compounds attach to only those specific structures. Some of the most beautiful microscopy images are collected with fluorescence microscopes; check out these images presented on the Nikon MicroscopyU webpage to see some examples. Fluorescence microscopy is useful for many biology studies that focus on a specific structure or cell type. For instance, many research studies on neurons in the brain depend on the use of fluorescence microscopy modalities that specifically image neurons.
In this instructable, I will go over the basic principles of fluorescence microscopy and how to build three different low-cost fluorescence microscopes. These systems usually cost thousands of dollars, but there have been recent efforts to make them more readily available. The designs I present here utilize a smart phone, a dSLR, and a USB microscope. All of these designs also work as brightfield microscopes. Let's get started!
To understand the basic idea of fluorescence microscopy, imagine a thick forest at night filled with trees, animals, bushes, and everything else living in a forest. If you shine a flashlight into the forest you see all of these structures and it can be hard to visualize a specific animal or plant. Let's say you were only interested in seeing blueberry bushes in the forest. To accomplish this, you train fireflies to be attracted to only blueberry bushes, so that only blueberry bushes light up when you look into the forest. You could say that you labeled the blueberry bushes with the fireflies so you could visualize only the blueberry structures in the forest.
