Versatile Microfluidic Platform for Automated Live-Cell Hyperspectral Imaging Applied to Cold Climate Cyanobacterial Biofilms.

Microfluidic bioanalytical platforms are driving discoveries from synthetic biology to the health sciences. In this work, we present a platform for live-cell imaging and automated species detection in mixed cyanobacterial biofilms from cold climate environments. Using a multimodal microscope with custom optics applied to a chip with six parallel growth channels, we monitored biofilm dynamics via continuous imaging at natural irradiance levels.

Tools and tutorial on practical ray tracing for microscopy.

An advanced understanding of optical design is necessary to create optimal systems but this is rarely taught as part of general curriculum. Compounded by the fact that professional optical design software tools have a prohibitive learning curve, this means that neither knowledge nor tools are easily accessible. In this tutorial, we introduce a raytracing module for Python, originally developed for teaching optics with ray matrices, to simplify the design and optimization of optical systems.