Ever wanted to know how a Light-Sheet can improve the Optical Resolution of a Microscope?
International Day of Light – Hackathon, 16.05.2019, 15-22 Uhr

Biomedical Engineering is an ever-growing interdisciplinary field trying to find insights into questions like “How to stop aging?”, “Can we cure cancer?” or “How can we feed a growing population?”. In order to accomplish that, researcher all-around the world need innovative tools to observe intra-cellular processes. During the last years, the so-called light-sheet microscope became increasingly popular because it can unlike ordinary microscopes, look deep into the tissue. Therefore a lightsheet, which can be thought of as a very thin light-plane, illuminates a transparent sample from the side. A fluorescent process, like in the knick lights in disco, converts the incoming blue light into green light. By blocking all blue light and only capturing the outgoing green light and by using a camera which is oriented perpendicular to the thin lightsheet it is possible to image selectively plane by plane.
Researchers around the world got deep insight into e.g. mouse-brains in order to understand the intra-neuronal connections or the development of the famous drosophila melanogaster – in vivo.

In this workshop we won’t observe our brains but use them in order to build our own low-cost 3D printed light-sheet microscope. The basic building-blocks are provided by our open-source optical toolbox UC2 [YouSeeToo]. During the hackathon you’ll learn the basic underlying physical principles and how to use the system to build a standard microscope. You will then form a team with four people where you develop a working prototype to image a fluorescent sample. This involves hacking into Arduino driven Microcontrollers, as well as designing and 3D-printing customized parts for the optical toolbox and taking care of the imaging process using a Raspberry Pi. The goal will be to build a microscope from block and strike with the best image acquisition.
We provide food and drinks to keep your neurons fired. To get the best out of this event we would like to ask you to bring your own laptop with a pre-installed Python version (e.g. Anaconda, Python 3.6).