Next spring, Carl Zeiss will begin shipping its Lightsheet Z.1 Light Sheet Microscope System, which was introduced this month at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. The original light sheet microscopy technology the System is based on was introduced by Carl Zeiss in the 1900s and has been adapted for three-dimensional fluorescence imaging in biology. The Lightsheet Z.1 is the only commercial product to incorporate fluorescence and light sheet for live imaging of developmental organisms, said Scott Olenych, product marketing manager of Imaging Products at Carl Zeiss Microscopy.

The System is designed to be a less damaging alternative to confocal microscopy or other laser scanning techniques for examining common biological samples such as zebrafish embryos and fruit flies. The System has a spatial resolution of 300–400 nm per slice. It can analyze a volume of about 500 ?m³ in about five minutes, said Dr. Olenych. The System’s light sheet illuminates sections by exciting only the in-focus plane, thus minimizing light exposure damage to the rest of the sample, whereas typical laser-scanning microscopy techniques expose the entire sample to light. “If you were imaging a 200-µm-thick piece of tissue with a confocal microscope and doing a 2-µm z-step, you’d expose the sample to 100 times more light than you would if using a 2-µm-thick light sheet,” said Dr. Olenych. Another benefit is the amount of light detected. “Virtually all of the available light is collected, making light sheet illumination a far more efficient technique than systems requiring a pinhole,” he said. Depending on configuration, the System is priced around $400,000.