Two- and one-photon color confocal screening microscope

The goal was to develop an upright microscope platform for the screening of slides employing one- and two-photon laser scanning techniques. A highly compact, vibration damping unit was created, which combines novel concepts for moving a slide in three dimensions, keeping it focused while doing so, scanning a laser-focus over the sample using novel galvanometer-control concepts, combining and separating excitation and emission beam and spectrally dispersing the emitted light by a linearized prism-spectrograph. Spectral detection is achieved by turning a 128 x 128 back-thinned EMCCD detector in a continuously reading spectral point-detector. To make the unit even ore versatile, it can be turned into a conventional wide field fluorescence microscope, enabling rapid routine observation to select regions of the sample for a subsequent, more detailed confocal analysis.