Recent approaches like the Flamingo 9, 10 set out to establish light sheet microscopy-as-a-service to everyone, thereby addressing the issue of accessibility. Luckily many great steps in this direction have already been made. In order to realize such a system, an open standard is paramount, as only in this way an effortless reconfiguration can be permitted without being overly restrictive to the possibilities. Such hands-on experience would lead to understanding and enabling everyone to perceive optics as a playground, where many ideas can easily be explored. It would substantially reduce the effort required to build a setup and allow students to actively perform system reconfigurations within minutes.
Such a tool would be useful not only for research, but also immensely helpful in optics education. The change from one imaging system to another could thus be reduced to a mere reconfiguration rather than a new design. Such platform would facilitate simple constructions of versatile imaging instruments, easy to adapt to almost any imaging task at hand. What we see as a substantial space for improvement, is an open standard 13 permitting straight-forward interfacing between constituents of modern microscopes including sources, optics, optomechanics, and detector components.
This makes it particularly hard to tailor or even reconfigure optical systems, requiring handcrafted adapters or unnecessarily long attachments compromising the systems’ integrity and stability. They typically originate from different manufacturers adhering to various industry standards such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or Royal Microscopy Society (RMS), whose intra-compatibility is often not guaranteed. Modern optical setups are reaching immense complexity, combining a growing number of optical and photomechanical components. Open research, in which every step is recorded transparently and made fully accessible to the general public, can help to restore the confidence in scientific literature, which has been visibly compromised in recent years 12. Separately, in light of the growing pressure to publish as soon as possible, science is approaching a reproducibility and quality crisis 11.
For a large variety of imaging tasks, such as those mentioned above, tailored solutions are indeed commercially available, yet they are often costly, hard to extend or modify and rarely documented sufficiently to enable users adapting them for “out-of-the-box tasks”, outside the range of their primary purposes. Assembling, maintaining and improving microscopes, as well as analyzing and verifying the produced data very often requires a consulting specialists dedicated to the respective instrument, thus further separating microscope engineers from their users 9, 10. The need to keep the cells in a well-controlled environment poses additional constraints being addressed by imaging inside an incubator 3, 4 or exploiting on-microscope incubator units 5, 6, 7, 8. Alongside numerous imaging modalities, long-term observations of living organisms, which have minimal impact on their natural behavior, became an important aspect in light microscopy. Growing demand in biological research for spatial and temporal resolution, imaging volume, molecular specificity, and high throughput leads to ever more complex and expensive microscopes 1, 2. By making the content and comprehensive documentation publicly available, the systems presented here lend themselves to easy and straightforward replications, modifications, and extensions. With this, we aim to establish an open standard in optics to facilitate interfacing with various complementary platforms. Furthermore, by including very few additional components, the geometry is transferred into a 400 Euro light sheet fluorescence microscope for volumetric observations of a transgenic Zebrafish expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP). The self-contained incubator-enclosed brightfield microscope monitors monocyte to macrophage cell differentiation for seven days at cellular resolution level (e.g. Too.) we present a low-cost, 3D-printed, open-source, modular microscopy toolbox and demonstrate its versatility by realizing a complete microscope development cycle from concept to experimental phase. Modern microscopes used for biological imaging often present themselves as black boxes whose precise operating principle remains unknown, and whose optical resolution and price seem to be in inverse proportion to each other.