An international team led by UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas has developed the miOPM, a versatile light-sheet microscope that captures 3D views of biological samples — from activity inside living cells to larger tissues — in a single system. The work was described in the journal Nature Methods and announced on November 5, 2026.
The microscope, called miOPM (multi-immersion oblique plane microscope), addresses a long-standing problem: advanced microscopes are usually built for a narrow range of tasks, forcing labs to buy and maintain several expensive instruments. The miOPM lets researchers switch objective lenses on one microscope designed for use with oil, water or air, adapting to different experiments without changing equipment.
One instrument, many scales
Like other light-sheet microscopes, the miOPM illuminates one thin section of a sample at a time, building a 3D picture while limiting unnecessary light exposure — protecting living samples and letting scientists follow biological activity as it unfolds. An adjustable zoom lens helps preserve image quality when scientists change the liquid surrounding a sample.
The team demonstrated the platform by observing moving structures on immune cells, tracking activity inside mitochondria, and examining lung and liver cancer tissue. The system also worked with standard 384-well laboratory plates containing live cells, showing it can study many samples efficiently — which, according to the university, could help pharmaceutical researchers test thousands of drug candidates more quickly.
The study was led by Reto Fiolka, associate professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics and of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern, with co-first author Bingying Chen, now a research specialist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. Besides UT Southwestern and other U.S. institutions, the team included researchers from Australia, Germany, Poland and the U.K. The study’s imaging was performed with two miOPM systems — one at UT Southwestern and one at Calico Life Sciences in San Francisco.
Fontes
- UT Southwestern Medical Center — New 3D microscope packs many imaging tools into one system
- Nature Methods — estudo sobre o microscópio multi-immersion oblique plane (miOPM)
Crédito da imagem: UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Transparency: this article was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence, cross-checking public posts and internet sources. Consult the original sources for more details.
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