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!

Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS)

Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy ( FCS ) measures fluctuations of fluorescence intensity in a sub-femtolitre volume to detect such parameters as the diffusion time, number of molecules or dark…

How to Clean Microscope Optics

Clean microscope optics are essential for obtaining good microscope images. If they are dirty, the microscope should be cleaned to avoid a loss of quality. If you decide to do this yourself, you…

Image Processing for Widefield Microscopy

Fluorescence microscopy is a modern and steadily evolving tool to bring light to current cell biological questions. With the help of fluorescent proteins or dyes it is possible to make discrete…

White Light Laser

The perfect light source for confocal microscopes in biomedical applications has sufficient intensity, tunable color and is pulsed for use in lifetime fluorescence. Furthermore, it should offer means…

Optical Microscopes – Some Basics

The optical microscope has been a standard tool in life science as well as material science for more than one and a half centuries now. To use this tool economically and effectively, it helps a lot to…

Controlling the TIRF Penetration Depth is Mandatory for Reproducible Results

The main feature of total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy is the employment of an evanescent wave for the excitation of fluorophores instead of using direct light. A property of the…

Basic Principles of Luminescence

There are a lot of light-emitting processes occurring in nature. Luminescence is an umbrella term for those kinds of events where light emission is not the result of high temperatures. This article…

Primary leaves of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata "California Blackeye") inoculated with cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) containing the GFP-gene inserted between the movement protein (MP) and the capsid proteins (CPs) in the viral RNA 2

Introduction to Live-Cell Imaging

The understanding of complex and fast cellular dynamics is an important step to get insight into biological processes. Therefore, today’s life science research more and more demands studying…

TIRF image of brest carcinoma tumor cells expressing GFP tagged cell adhesion Molecule CD44 that is expressed on the cell membrane, imagined in TIRF.

Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) Microscopy

Total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) is a special technique in fluorescence microscopy developed by Daniel Axelrod at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the early 1980s. TIRF microscopy…