Ultra high-speed single-molecule fluorescence imaging.

In two articles in this issue, Fujiwara et al. developed an ultrasensitive high-speed camera capable of single-molecule fluorescence imaging at a microsecond timescale (2023. J. Cell Biol.https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202110160). This major leap in detection speed enables the organization of plasma membrane and integrin-based adhesions to be probed in unprecedented detail (2023. J. Cell Biol.https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202110162).

Lattice light sheets generated with a firmly arranged dielectric regular hexagonal pyramid array.

We present a firmly arranged dielectric regular hexagonal pyramid array to generate lattice light sheets with high conversion efficiency and low stray light. Both the size and working distance of the lattice light sheets can be modulated by changing the structural parameters. We experimentally recorded the lattice light sheets illumination, which is consistent with the corresponding simulation. To evaluate the imaging quality, we compared the light field generated with and without structure by using polystyrene fluorescent microspheres. This study provides a potential method for the building of light sheet fluorescence microscopy with high resolution and low phototoxicity.

Dynamic imaging of zebrafish heart with multi-planar light sheet microscopy.

Light sheet fluorescence microscopy has become a research hotspot in biomedicine because of low phototoxicity, high speed, and high resolution. However, the conventional methods to acquire three-dimensional spatial information are mainly based on scanning, which inevitably increases photodamage and is not real-time. Here, we propose a method to generate controllable multi-planar illumination with a dielectric isosceles triangular array and a design of multi-planar light sheet fluorescence microscopy system. We carry out experiments of three-dimensional illumination beam measurement, volumetric imaging of fluorescent microspheres, and dynamic in vivo imaging of zebrafish heart to evaluate the performance of this system. In addition, we apply this system to study the effects of bisphenol fluorene on the heart shape and heart-beating rate of zebrafish. Our experiment results indicate that the multi-planar light sheet microscopy system provides a novel and feasible method for three-dimensional selected plane imaging and low-phototoxicity in vivo imaging.

All-Dielectric Meta-Surface for Multispectral Photography by Theta Modulation.

The traditional theta modulator encodes input information by superimposing Ronchi sub-gratings, which is extremely easy to cause spatial channel overlap that results in bands mixing. In this case, we present an all-dielectric theta modulation meta-surface with a new encoding method, which separates red, green, blue, and achromatic spatial channels on the focal plane. The meta-surface ensures that the positions of focal points are relatively consistent while focusing energy into the sub-wavelength regions. Our study offers a way to facilitate device miniaturization and system integration, which may have an important application in compact multispectral photography only with one detector.