What is the difference between a fluorescence microscope and a conventional microscope?
I recently tried to make some frozen sections of mice. Next, I will use a fluorescence microscope to see if the virus I injected is in the brain area I want. Some basic principles of fluorescence microscopy need to be learned briefly, and I will share them here.
Fluorescence microscopes use ultraviolet light as a light source to illuminate the object being inspected, causing the object to emit light, and then observe the object under the microscope. It is mainly used for immunofluorescence cells. It is mainly composed of a light source, a filter plate system and an optical system. The fluorescence image of the sample is observed through the magnification of the eyepiece and objective lens. Let’s take a look at the difference between a fluorescence microscope and an ordinary optical microscope.
1. Look at the lighting method
The illumination method of fluorescence microscope is generally epi-illumination, which means that the light source is placed on the test sample through the objective lens.
2. Look at the resolution
Fluorescence microscopes use ultraviolet light as a light source, which has a shorter wavelength but higher resolution than ordinary optical microscopes.
3. Differences in filters
Fluorescence microscopes use two special filters. They are used in front of the light source to filter out visible light, and between the objective lens and the eyepiece to filter out ultraviolet rays, which can protect human eyes.
Fluorescence microscope is also a type of optical microscope. The main reason is that the wavelength excited by fluorescence microscope is short, so this leads to the difference in structure and use between fluorescence microscope and ordinary microscope. Most fluorescence microscopes have good function of capturing weak light. , so its imaging ability is also good under extremely weak fluorescence. Coupled with the continuous improvement of fluorescence microscopes in recent years, the noise has also been greatly reduced. Therefore, more and more fluorescence microscopes are being used.
