Scientists devise ‘glowscope’ to bring fluorescent microscopy to schools

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Msc

Concept :

Researchers at the Winona State University, Minnesota, have created a design for a ‘glowscope’, a device that could democratize access to fluorescence microscopy.

About Fluorescence Microscopy:

A fluorescence microscope views an object by studying how it re¬emits light that it has absorbed, e., how it fluoresces. This is its basic principle.
How it works?
The object is illuminated with light of a specific wavelength.
Particles in the object absorb this light and re¬emit it at a higher wavelength (i.e., different color). These particles are called fluorophores.
The object is infused with fluorophores before being placed under the microscope.
When the fluorophores fluoresce, a fluorescent microscope can track them as they move inside the object, revealing the object’s internal shape and other characteristics.
Scientists have developed different fluorophores to identify and study different entities, from specific parts of the DNA to protein complexes.

Applications:

It is used to image specific features of small specimens such as microbes.
It is also used to visually enhance 3-D features at small scales.
It allows the use of multicolor staining, labeling of structures within cells, and the measurement of the physiological state of a cell.
It is the most popular method for studying the dynamic behavior exhibited in live-cell imaging.
Different molecules can now be stained with different colors, allowing multiple types of molecules to be tracked simultaneously.

Optical Microscopy

An optical microscope, also known as a light microscope, views an object by studying how it absorbs, reflects, or scatters visible light.
It uses one or a series of lenses to magnify images of small samples with visible light.
The lenses are placed between the sample and the viewer’s eye to magnify the image so that it can be examined in greater detail.