Introduction

This system is a low-cost wide-field fluorescent imaging system with millimeter-scale field of view and micron-level resolution. In this system, a large numeric aperture and low magnification objective is used to image the whole brain slices of mice in one snapshot or to record the neuronal activity of the whole cortex of a head-restrained behaving mouse.

Advantages

Two excitation light sources: 470 nm and 405 nm, with 405 nm as a reference channel.

Four-port behavioral event acquisition, each port supports up to 1 kHz sampling rate.

Customized acquisition program.

Imaging Examples

(A) Resolution target imaged by the system in bright field, and (B) is a zoomed-in view of the red rectangle in (A). The field of view is about 15 mm × 15 mm and the resolution is 6.96 μm (Group 6, Element 2). (C) Fluorescence image of a brain slice taken by the system. (D)* Whole cortex of a GCaMP6-labeled behaving mouse imaged under the system. (* Image provided by Jingfeng Zhou's Lab.)

Principle

The light emitted by the 405 nm and 470 nm LEDs is combined into one beam, which is reflected by a dichroic mirror and focused by a large-aperture objective lens. The two excitation lights alternately excite labeled fluorescent proteins in the cerebral cortex. The emitted fluorescence signal is collected by the same objective and captured by the camera after passing through a fluorescence filter.

Parameters