The mesoSPIM (mesoscale selective plane illumination microscopy) project creates open-hardware microscopy platforms for imaging cleared tissue samples. The microscopy setup costs between $170,000 to $240,000 including the optical table and most importantly, the laser itself which will run you between $40,000 to $110,000. This stretches the definition of “On The Cheap”, but the project is […]
Category: Articles
A Workhorse for 18k: DIY Microscopy with Flexiscope
The Flexiscope is DIY microscope that can be easily converted from upright to inverted configurations in “under 30 minutes”. It’s capable of oblique infrared illumination imaging, multi-channel fluorescent imaging, automated 3D scanning, and even has an electrophysiology configuration. The paper, written by Amy Courtney, Luke Alvey , George Merces, and Mark Pickering which details the […]
An Open-Source Plate Reader
Plate readers are instruments which are used to detect properties of samples in microtiter plates, via absorbance, fluorescence, and luminescence. Karol Szymula, Michael Magaraci, Michael Patterson, Andrew Clark, Sevile Mannickarottu, and Brian Chow published a paper in September 2018 detailing the construction and performance of an open-source plate reader. The extensive supplementary materials provide everything you will need, from software to parts list to a […]
Continuous Flow Systems For Chemistry on the Cheap
Continuous Flow Systems run chemical reactions by continuously flowing reactants past each other. Pumps control fluid channels holding the reagents and chemical reactions occur at intersections of those pumps. It’s the chemistry version of the Lab On a Chip. Flow chemistry doesn’t have to be small-scale, it’s used in industrial manufacturing, but it can be […]
A Simple Strobe Light For Microscopy
Strobe lighting can be used to take crisp images of objects that would normally appear blurred due to their motion during a camera’s integration time. They can also be used to image cycling motion with far greater temporal resolution. Christian Willert, Boleslaw Stasicki, S. Moessner and Joachim Klinner have written a paper detailing a simple […]