I have been working in Dr. Schaffer’s lab for a little over two years. Amanda and I are working on construction of a new, 4 channel 2-photon microscope, and development of novel hyperspectral detection optics. I also work on maintaining and adding functionality to ScanImage, the program that we use for data acquisition. The four channel microscope is the second one being built. The first microscope (built for Dr. Fetcho’s lab) took its first images over the summer. Four channels will allow us to use more fluorescent tags in our samples, enabling us to observe and study more complex relationships. The microscope uses detection optics that I designed to capture a large amount of scattered light. This allows us to collect signal more efficiently and image deeper. The hyperspectral detection optics will use tunable bandpass filters from Semrock. These four filters will each be tuned to 4 different bandpasses, allowing us to collect 16 channels of spectral information. Using 3 excitation lasers will increase this to 48 channels. Such dense spectral information will allow us to image more fluorescent molecules and characterize autofluorescence. I have worked with Vijay Iyer at Janelia Farm Research Campus to add support for the Newport XPS stage controller to ScanImage. In addition, we can now take “faststacks,†which increase the speed of stack acquisition by moving the stage continuously, instead of in discrete steps between frames.
