Industry Tutorial: Adaptive Optics in microscopy benefits and trends

“Seeing is believing”. The urgency to observe and quantify molecular and subcellular dynamics inside multicellular organisms is impeded by a major dilemma in available imaging technology. The large dynamic range of biological processes—interactions of molecules within milliseconds result in changes across whole-organisms over days—calls for imaging with high spatiotemporal resolution and large-scale long-term coverage. However, high resolution imaging often requires frequent sampling in both space and time and hence limits its spatiotemporal coverage. To tackle this dilemma, we have integrated different imaging technologies into a novel multimodal imaging platform—MOSAIC—that can be easily reconfigured to optimize for specific biological applications and provide complementary information of the same samples across spatiotemporal scales. Importantly, adaptive optics correction is implemented for each imaging modality to recover resolution and contrast deep inside optical challenging multicellular organisms. I will demonstrate the application of this platform to various biological systems, including cultured cells, embryoid bodies, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis elegans, zebrafish, and live mice. This integrated imaging platform opened new windows to probe dynamics in biology with minimum perturbation and expanded spatiotemporal ranges.