EMBL tech developers have made an important leap forward with a novel methodology that adds an important microscopy capability to life scientists’ toolbox. The advance represents a 1,000-fold improvement in speed and throughput in Brillouin microscopy and provides a way to view light-sensitive organisms more efficiently.

“We were on a quest to speed up image acquisition,” said Carlo Bevilacqua, optical engineer in EMBL’s Prevedel team and lead author on a paper published about this technological development in Nature Photonics.

“Over the years, we have progressed from being able to see just a pixel at a time to a line of 100 pixels, to now a full plane that offers a view of approximately 10,000 pixels.”