Differences Between Ordinary Optical Microscopes and Fluorescence Microscopes
Optical microscope: It is an optical instrument that uses optical principles to magnify and image tiny objects that cannot be distinguished by the human eye, in order to extract information about their microstructures.
Fluorescence microscope: A fluorescence microscope uses ultraviolet light as a light source to irradiate the object being inspected, causing it to emit fluorescence, and then observes the shape and position of the object under the microscope. Fluorescence microscopy is used to study the absorption, transport, distribution, and localization of substances within cells. Some substances in cells, such as chlorophyll, can fluoresce when exposed to ultraviolet radiation; There are also some substances that cannot emit fluorescence themselves, but can also emit fluorescence if stained with fluorescent dyes or fluorescent antibodies and irradiated with ultraviolet light. Fluorescence microscopy is one of the tools for qualitative and quantitative research on such substances.
An optical microscope generally consists of a stage, a spotlight illumination system, an objective lens, an eyepiece, and a focusing mechanism. The spotlight lighting system can obtain different observation methods, such as dark object points on a bright background (called bright field illumination) or bright object points on a dark background (called dark field illumination), by changing the lighting mode, in order to better discover and observe microstructures in different situations.
There are the following differences between fluorescence microscope and ordinary microscope:
1. The illumination method is usually a falling type, where the light source is projected onto the sample through an objective lens;
2. The light source is ultraviolet light, with a shorter wavelength and higher resolution than ordinary microscopes;
3. There are two special filters, the one in front of the light source is used to filter out visible light, and the one between the eyepiece and objective lens is used to filter out ultraviolet light to protect the human eye.
Fluorescence microscope is also a type of optical microscope, with the main difference being the excitation wavelength. This determines the differences in structure and usage methods between fluorescence microscopes and ordinary optical microscopes.
Fluorescence microscope is a fundamental tool for immunofluorescence cell chemistry. It is composed of main components such as light source, filter plate system, and optical system. It is the use of light of a certain wavelength to excite the specimen to emit fluorescence, which is then magnified through an objective lens and eyepiece system to observe the fluorescence image of the specimen.
