The approach, a form of adaptive optics, works in tissues that do not scatter light, making it well suited to imaging the transparent bodies of zebrafish and the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, important model organisms in biological research. Janelia group leader Eric Betzig says his team developed the new technology by combining adaptive optics strategies that astronomers and ophthalmologists use to cancel out similar distortions in their images.

In a report published online on April 13, 2014, in the journal Nature Methods, Betzig, postdoctoral fellow Kai Wang, and their colleagues show how the technique brings into focus the fine, branching structures and subcellular organelles of nerve cells deep in the living brain of a zebrafish. These structures remain blurry and indistinct under the same microscope without adaptive optics. "The results are pretty eye-popping," Betzig says. "This really takes the application of adaptive optics to microscopy to a completely different level."

"Our technique is really robust, and you don't need anything special to apply our technology. [In the future] it could be a very convenient add-on component to commercially available microscopes," says Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Betzig's lab.

Over the last decade, Betzig and others have taken a cue from astronomers in using adaptive optics to correct for the light-bending heterogeneity of biological tissues. Astronomers apply adaptive optics by shining a laser high in the atmosphere in the same direction as an object they want to observe, Betzig explains. The light returning from this so-called guide star gets distorted as it travels through the turbulent atmosphere back to the telescope. Using a tool called a wavefront sensor, astronomers measure this distortion directly, then use the measurements to deform a telescope mirror to cancel out the atmospheric aberrations. The correction gives a much clearer view of the target object they want to observe.

New technique takes cues from astronomy and ophthalmology to sharpen microscope images

The approach, a form of adaptive optics, works in tissues that do not scatter light, making it well suited to imaging the transparent bodies of zebrafish and the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, important model organisms in biological research. Janelia group leader Eric Betzig says his team developed the new technology by combining adaptive optics strategies that astronomers and ophthalmologists use to cancel out similar distortions in their images.
In a report published online on April 13, 2014, in the journal Nature Methods, Betzig, postdoctoral fellow Kai Wang, and their colleagues show how the technique brings into focus the fine, branching structures and subcellular organelles of nerve cells deep in the living brain of a zebrafish. These structures remain blurry and indistinct under the same microscope without adaptive optics. "The results are pretty eye-popping," Betzig says. "This really takes the application of adaptive optics to microscopy to a completely different level."
"Our technique is really robust, and you don't need anything special to apply our technology. [In the future] it could be a very convenient add-on component to commercially available microscopes," says Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Betzig's lab.
Over the last decade, Betzig and others have taken a cue from astronomers in using adaptive optics to correct for the light-bending heterogeneity of biological tissues. Astronomers apply adaptive optics by shining a laser high in the atmosphere in the same direction as an object they want to observe, Betzig explains. The light returning from this so-called guide star gets distorted as it travels through the turbulent atmosphere back to the telescope. Using a tool called a wavefront sensor, astronomers measure this distortion directly, then use the measurements to deform a telescope mirror to cancel out the atmospheric aberrations. The correction gives a much clearer view of the target object they want to observe.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-04-technique-cues-astronomy-ophthalmology-sharpen.html#jCp