Simultaneous multiple-excitation multiphoton microscopy yields increased imaging sensitivity and specificity

BMC Biotechnology

Methodology Article

Nikolay S Makarov¹  Aleksander Rebane¹  Mikhail Drobizhev¹  Brendan C Brinkman²  Joseph G Gleeson²  Margaret T Butko² 

[1] Department of Physics, Montana State University, 59717, Bozeman, MT, USA;Departments of Neuroscience and Biomedical Graduate Program, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, 92093, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;

关键词: Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy;    Spectral Separation;    Emission Channel;    Beam Combiner;    Finer Microtubule;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6750-11-20

 received in 2010-06-28, accepted in 2011-03-02,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundMultiphoton microscopy (MPM) offers many advantages over conventional wide-field and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) for imaging biological samples such as 3D resolution of excitation, reduced phototoxicity, and deeper tissue imaging. However, adapting MPM for critical multi-color measurements presents a challenge because of the largely overlapping two-photon absorption (TPA) peaks of common biological fluorophores. Currently, most multi-color MPM relies on the absorbance at one intermediate wavelength of multiple dyes, which introduces problems such as decreased and unequal excitation efficiency across the set of dyes.ResultsHere we describe an MPM system incorporating two, independently controlled sources of two-photon excitation whose wavelengths are adjusted to maximally excite one dye while minimally exciting the other. We report increased signal-to-noise ratios and decreased false positive emission bleed-through using this novel multiple-excitation MPM (ME-MPM) compared to conventional single-excitation MPM (SE-MPM) in a variety of multi-color imaging applications.ConclusionsSimilar to the tremendous gain in popularity of CLSM after the introduction of multi-color imaging, we anticipate that the ME-MPM system will further increase the popularity of MPM. In addition, ME-MPM provides an excellent tool to more rapidly design and optimize pairs of fluorescence probes for multi-color two-photon imaging, such as CFP/YFP or GFP/DsRed for CLSM.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Butko et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.