AUTHOR=Sancataldo Giuseppe , Gavryusev Vladislav , de Vito Giuseppe , Turrini Lapo , Locatelli Massimiliano , Fornetto Chiara , Tiso Natascia , Vanzi Francesco , Silvestri Ludovico , Pavone Francesco Saverio TITLE=Flexible Multi-Beam Light-Sheet Fluorescence Microscope for Live Imaging Without Striping Artifacts JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroanatomy VOLUME=13 YEAR=2019 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroanatomy/articles/10.3389/fnana.2019.00007 DOI=10.3389/fnana.2019.00007 ISSN=1662-5129 ABSTRACT=

The development of light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) has greatly expanded the experimental capabilities in many biological and biomedical research fields, enabling for example live studies of murine and zebrafish neural activity or of cell growth and division. The key feature of the method is the selective illumination of a sample single plane, providing an intrinsic optical sectioning and allowing direct 2D image recording. On the other hand, this excitation scheme is more affected by absorption or scattering artifacts in comparison to point scanning methods, leading to un-even illumination. We present here an easily implementable method, based on acousto-optical deflectors (AOD), to overcome this obstacle. We report the advantages provided by flexible and fast AODs in generating simultaneous angled multiple beams from a single laser beam and in fast light sheet pivoting and we demonstrate the suppression of illumination artifacts.