The field of astronomy has long been using techniques to unblur images of far-away galaxies by measuring how light is distorted by the atmosphere and applying corrections to cancel out aberrations. Now, researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus have adapted these methods for use in the life sciences, providing biologists with a faster and cheaper way to obtain clearer and sharper microscopy images.
While microscopists have been trying to adapt astronomy techniques to generate clearer images of thick biological samples, the existing methods, known as adaptive optics, are complex, expensive, and slow. This has made them inaccessible to many laboratories, limiting the capabilities of biologists to study microscopic structures in detail.
In an effort to make adaptive optics technology more widely available to biologists, the team at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus has turned to a class of techniques called phase diversity. These methods involve adding additional images with known aberrations to a blurry image with unknown aberrations, providing enough information to unblur the original image.
To implement the phase diversity method, the researchers adapted an astronomy algorithm for microscopy and validated it through simulations. They also built a microscope with a deformable mirror and two additional lenses to create the known aberrations. These modifications were minor and did not require major changes to the existing microscope setup. Additionally, the team improved the software used to carry out the phase diversity correction.
As a test of their new method, the team demonstrated that they could calibrate the microscope’s deformable mirror 100 times faster than with competing methods. They also showed that the new method could sense and correct randomly generated aberrations, resulting in clearer images of fluorescent beads and fixed cells. The next step is to test the method on real-world samples, including living cells and tissues, and to extend its use to more complex microscopes.
The team at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus hopes that their new method will make adaptive optics technology more automated and easier to use. They believe that the faster and cheaper implementation of this technique could one day make adaptive optics accessible to more labs, allowing biologists to see more clearly when studying tissues at a microscopic level. By leveraging astronomy techniques in the life sciences, researchers are pushing the boundaries of microscopy and opening doors to new discoveries in biology.
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