The invention of SPIM, which allowed scientists to watch an embryo develop for the first time, was hailed as one of the top breakthroughs. Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM) is still relatively new, only dating back to the mid 1990s. But its huge potential is already clear. What started in a physics lab led to the first groundbreaking insights in biology just 10 years later. Now, with new papers and a new start-up, EMBL researchers show they are still adding new dimensions to the technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was in the late 1980s that Roelof W Wijnaendts-van-Resandt, Ernst Stelzer and members of his lab at EMBL started developing the multi-lens microscopes that would become SPIM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The simplest microscopes shine light on or through a subject, which an observer then looks at through a magnifying lens. Fluorescence microscopy \u2014 itself a relatively new technique \u2014 uses dyes or genetic modifications that cause specific parts of a cell to glow when exposed to certain wavelengths of light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fluorescence microscopy is powerful, but the light that spurs cells to fluoresce also damages them. Stelzer\u2019s lab found a solution that has unlocked huge opportunities. By confining light to a very thin sheet, they could light up just one plane at a time for the microscope to focus on, protecting the other parts of the sample. Repeating the process over and over gives a complete picture of the specimen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jan Huisken was a PhD student in Stelzer\u2019s lab in the early 2000s. A decade earlier, Stelzer\u2019s lab had developed a fluorescence microscope that used two opposing lenses to get a full view of a sample suspended in a droplet of water. Huisken\u2019s task was to use beams of light to manipulate a sample suspended in a water droplet \u2014 something that turned out to be very difficult. The group decided to look for an easier solution, and SPIM was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere are moments when you can really say, \u2018That is an intellectual breakthrough\u2019,\u201d says Stelzer, who is now at the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Sciences at the Goethe Universit\u00e4t in Frankfurt. It wasn\u2019t long before Stelzer and his biologist colleagues were seeing the possibilities of SPIM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An advanced version of SPIM was used to create the stunning videos of a growing fish embryo highlighted by Science<\/em> as one of the breakthroughs of the year in 2008. EMBL biophysicist Phillip Keller\u2019s movie let scientists track each individual cell, answering previously unanswerable questions about how animals develop.<\/p>\n\n\n