Leica Microsystems: Leica Science Lab

Science Lab

The knowledge portal of Leica Microsystems offers scientific research and teaching material on the subjects of microscopy. The content is designed to support beginners, experienced practitioners and scientists alike in their everyday work and experiments. Explore interactive tutorials and application notes, discover the basics of microscopy as well as high-end technologies – become part of the Science Lab community and share your expertise!

Primary Beam Splitting Devices for Confocal Microscopes

Current fluorescence microscopy employs incident illumination which requires separation of illumination and emission light. The classical device performing this separation is a color-dependent beam…

Photoactivatable, Photoconvertible, and Photoswitchable Fluorescent Proteins

Fluorescent proteins (FPs) such as GFP, YFP or DsRed are powerful tools to visualize cellular components in living cells. Nevertheless, there are circumstances when classical FPs reach their limits.…

Pinhole diameter and diffraction pattern.

Pinhole Effect in Confocal Microscopes

When operating a confocal microscope, or when discussing features and parameters of such a device, we inescapably mention the pinhole and its diameter. This short introductory document is meant to…

Comparison when observing a rodent model organism with a Greenough versus CMO (common main objective) stereo microscope for a task like surgery.

Rodent and Small-Animal Surgery

Learn how you can perform rodent (mouse, rat, hamster) and small-animal surgery efficiently with a microscope for developmental biology and medical research applications by reading this article.

Navigating Through the Brain

One of the challenges of neurosurgery is orientation at the surgical site. When resecting tumors, removing arteriovenous malformations, or clipping aneurysms, surgeons often have to work near healthy…

Left: Tissue cells marked with an immunolabel (FITC) illuminated with wide-band UV excitation. Note the tissue structure with blue autofluorescence. Right: Same tissue and same immunostaining with FITC label illuminated with epi-illumination using narrow-band blue (490 nm) light. Note the increased image contrast (Ploem, 1967)

Milestones in Incident Light Fluorescence Microscopy

Since the middle of the last century, fluorescence microscopy developed into a bio scientific tool with one of the biggest impacts on our understanding of life. Watching cells and proteins with the…

Porous Ceramics - Sample Preparation for SEM

Application Note for Leica EM RES102 - Ceramic membrane filters with pore sizes down to a few nanometres must be investigated in cross-section with regard to the structure of the pores. The smallest…

HeLa cells stimulated with LPS. Image has been subjected to deconvolution.

Chronic Inflammation Under the Microscope

In the course of chronic inflammation certain body areas are recurrently inflamed. This goes along with many human diseases. With the help of widefield light microscopy, the underlying processes can…

What is OCT?

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive, non-contact imaging modality used to visualize and monitor changes to the morphology of biological tissue. OCT employs low-coherence…