Inspired in part by the design of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the new technology uses mirror segments to align and collect light at the microscopic scale, producing images of molecules with a new level of resolution: the position and orientation of each. three dimensions.

Details of this new system developed by Oumen Zhang, a recent PhD. December 5 in the journal Nature Photonics Published by graduates from the lab of Matthew Liu, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at Washington University’s McKelvey School of Engineering in St.

Like a space telescope, a radially and azimuthally polarized reflector microscope (raMVR) depends on collecting as much light as possible. But instead of using this light to see things far away, it uses it to distinguish different properties of tiny fluorescent molecules attached to proteins and cell membranes.

“The installation was partially inspired by telescopes,” said Zhang. “This is a very similar setup. We use pyramid-shaped mirrors instead of JWST’s usual honeycomb shape.”

Currently, microscopes in this field face the challenges of creating biological images. First, such a small amount of light emitted by fluorescent molecules is susceptible to the smallest aberrations, including the turbid environment inside the cell. Therefore, accurate imaging relies more on computer processing to determine orientation after the image has been taken.Credit: St. Washington University in St. Louis

“Consider rendering a color image when all you have are the grayscale camera sensors,” Liu said. “You can try to reproduce the color with a computing tool or directly measure it with a color sensor that uses different absorbing color filters on different pixels to determine colors.”

Similarly, standard microscopes simply do not determine how molecules are oriented. The raMVR microscope uses polarizing optics called waveplates, together with pyramid-shaped mirrors, to split light into eight channels, each representing a different part of the molecule’s position and orientation.

It is noteworthy that the ramVR microscope is not a small technology. But less is not always better.

“At the cutting edge of engineering physics, we often have to make compromises to keep our devices compact,” Liu said. “Here we decided to take a different approach: How can we use every precious particle of light to make the most accurate measurements possible? It’s certainly exciting to think differently about microscope architecture, and we believe the new 6D imaging performance here will enable new scientific discoveries in the near future.”