Turku Screening Unit Receives Funding to Establish Single Objective Light Sheet for longitudinal and dynamic screening of complex 3D cell systems

The Research Council of Finland awarded an infrastructure grant to the Turku Screening Unit as a part of the EU-OPENSCREEN-FINLAND consortium. The funding awarded to the Turku Screening Unit is to establish a single objective light sheet system in 2024, as part of the services at the facility.

Physiological cell-based disease models are becoming increasingly available. However these are 3 dimentional multicellular systems with complex and heterogenous dynamics. Conventional 3D imaging uses highly phototoxic confocal approaches that illuminate the entire depth of a sample every time a single slice is imaged, thereby precluding longitudinal analyses. Light sheet systems avoid this problem but typically involve inconvenient sample suspension between multiple objectives, which compromises multi-sample analysis and precludes screening.

The single-objective light sheet design uses a conventional microscope stage, moves the optical complexities beneath the stage, providing a far more convenient, accessible and photon-efficient system for rapid 3D imaging the dynamics of complex cell systems.