title: Slicing embryos gently with laser light sheets.
abstract: Light sheet microscopy is an easy to implement and extremely powerful alternative to established fluorescence imaging techniques such as laser scanning confocal, multi-photon and spinning disk microscopy. By illuminating the sample only with a thin slice of light, photo-bleaching is reduced to a minimum, making light sheet microscopy ideal for non-destructive imaging of fragile samples over extended periods of time. Millimeter-sized samples can be imaged rapidly with high resolution and high depth penetration. A large variety of instruments have been developed and optimized for a number of different samples: Bessel beams form thin light sheets for single cells, and selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM) offers multi-view acquisition to image entire embryos with isotropic resolution. This review explains how light sheet microscopy involves a conceptually new microscope design and how it changes modern imaging in biology.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany. huisken@mpi-cbg.de
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huisken
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D007834:Lasers; D008853:Microscopy / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D015027:Zebrafish / Q000196:embryology*