The University Imaging Centers are excited to announce the installation of 3i's Cleared Tissue LightSheet microscope at the UIC Jackson Hall facility.

Cleared Tissue LightSheet (CTLS) is a large field light-sheet microscope designed to image whole organs at high speed. CTLS creates a focused sheet with a narrow waist for better optical sectioning, then uses a spatial light modulator (SLM) to rapidly shift the waist of the sheet along the axis of propagation. A dual excitation setup allows imaging from the right and left sides of the specimen for optimal light-sheet projection throughout. Piezoelectric stages move the specimen in x, y, and z with sub-micron resolution. The result is clear: a 1 cm3 volume can be imaged at up to 1µm x 1µm x 3µm (XYZ) resolution, and a cleared mouse brain can be imaged in as little as 1.5 hours.

Light sheet microscopy is a powerful technique for imaging large specimens by taking full advantage of emerging tissue clearing methods. The chemistry behind these techniques has advanced to where we can easily penetrate 1, 5 even 10mm into a specimen with a focused sheet of light. In combination with a macro zoom microscope using high NA large field of view lenses, Cleared Tissue LightSheet can image large field sizes with high resolution in short periods of timeCTLS acquisition is extremely flexible, from ultrafast capture with a 20μm light sheet to high-resolution capture with a 3μm light-sheet shifted 20 times and the resulting 20 sections of best focus tiled to one best-focus image.