Microscopes Borrow Tricks from Astronomy

Microscopes Borrow Tricks from Astronomy - Lab Manager Magazine®
http://www.labmanager.com/?articles....from-Astronomy

"Principal investigator Joel Kubby, an associate professor of electrical
engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UCSC, has worked on
adaptive optics (AO) systems for large telescopes as well as for
biological imaging. In astronomy, AO systems correct the blurring of
telescope images caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. In
microscopy, blurring is caused by the flowing cytoplasm of living cells.

“We can get beautiful images of cells close to the surface of the
tissue, but if you want to go deep you're out of luck because of the
degradation of the image. That was the motivation for this project,”
said co-investigator William Sullivan, professor of molecular, cell, and
developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz. “For cell biologists, anything
that improves imaging is a big deal, and this has the potential to open
up vast areas of cell biology that have been opaque to us.”

In stem cell research, for example, an important bottleneck in efforts
to develop stem cell therapies has been the inability to follow injected
stem cells and monitor their fates below the surface of the tissue. AO
microscopy could solve this problem, and the California Institute for
Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has provided support for the work at UCSC,
including funding that led to the development of the team's first AO
microscope."