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!

Schematic graph of the light path in a Spalt-Ultramikroskop.

Confocal and Light Sheet Imaging

Optical imaging instrumentation can magnify tiny objects, zoom in on distant stars and reveal details that are invisible to the naked eye. But it notoriously suffers from an annoying problem: the…

Universal PAINT – Dynamic Super-Resolution Microscopy

Super-resolution microscopy techniques have revolutionized biology for the last ten years. With their help cellular components can now be visualized at the size of a protein. Nevertheless, imaging…

Immersion Freezing for Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy: Applications

A well established usage case for cryo-TEM is three-dimensional reconstruction of isolated macromolecules, virus particles, or filaments. On one hand, these approaches are based on averaging of…

Immersion Freezing for Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy: Fundamentals

The high vacuum required in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) greatly impairs the ability to study specimens naturally occurring in an aqueous phase: exposing "wet" specimens to a pressure…

Video Tutorials: Filling and Assembling of Different Carriers for High-Pressure Freezing

High pressure freezing (HPF) is a cryo-fixation method primarily for biological samples, but also for a variety of non-biological materials. It is a technique that yields optimal preservation in many…

FusionOptics in Neurosurgery and Ophthalmology – for a Larger 3D Area in Focus

Neurosurgeons and ophthalmologists deal with delicate structures, deep or narow cavities and tiny structures with vitally important functions. A clear, three-dimensional view on the surgical field is…

Brief Introduction to Freeze Fracture and Etching

Freeze fracture describes the technique of breaking a frozen specimen to reveal internal structures. Freeze etching is the sublimation of surface ice under vacuum to reveal details of the fractured…

Brief Introduction to Specimen Trimming

Before ultrathin sectioning a sample with an ultramicrotome it has to be pre-prepared. For this pre-preparation, special attention must be paid to the sample size (size of the section), location of…

Glycerol Spraying/Platinum Low Angle Rotary Shadowing of DNA with the Leica EM ACE600 e-beam

Glycerol spraying/low angle rotary shadowing (Aebi and Baschong, 2006) is a preparation technique used in biology to visualize structures yielding insufficent contrast with other techniques, due to…