The Olympus Fluoview 1000 Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope is an advanced, fluoresent microscope with resolution that can literally not be beat. The main operating principal is "throw out" all light that does not originate from the focal point of the microscope objective. This creates a clean crisp image one 'focal volume' at a time - in other words each pixel is imaged independently. An extremely valuable outcome of imaging each pixel separately is that one can also image vertically - in effect creating a 3D image of a sample.
The drawback of a technique that primarily cuts down the amount of light entering the microscope, is that the image will be faint. To combat this problem the Fluoview uses two important 'tricks' 1) the light source used is a powerful laser and 2) the light detector is very sensitive (in other words not your eye). These two innovations result in an instrument capable of many advanced functions: sensitive fluorescence detection, multiple well defined excitation sources (lasers), photobleaching etc.
In particular, our system uses 3 lasers to generate 7 different laser lines (listed below). These colours can be used directly to image a sample, or can be used to excite the fluorescence of a dye. On the detection side, the instrument has 3 photo-multiplier tubes (PMT's). Light from a sample can then be filtered with various dichroic mirrors (big separations like red green blue) or 'notch' colour filters (small separations). Taken together this allows the separation of many different fluorescent signals!
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