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This webinar, produced with Nature Custom Media and sponsored by Hamamatsu Photonics, introduces a breakthrough approach to overcoming a fundamental limit in fluorescence microscopy: the trade-off between information and photodamage.
Your presenter, Dr. Tanner Faderao, a microscopy engineer and inventor at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, explains how traditional imaging methods—widefield and confocal—force biologists to choose between capturing fast, meaningful cellular dynamics and preserving the health of their samples. Photobleaching and phototoxicity degrade fluorophores, poison cells, and ultimately limit what we can observe, especially over time. Tanner then walks through how single-objective light-sheet microscopy solves these problems by illuminating only the thin plane being imaged, dramatically reducing the light load on the sample. This enables faster, gentler, high-resolution 3D imaging using standard coverslip-mounted samples. He shares real examples—from immune cells, cardiomyocytes, and cytoskeletal structures to developing embryos—showing how this modality reveals rapid biological processes that conventional microscopes either miss or destroy.
The webinar also highlights a striking new advancement: adding a near-infrared co-illumination beam to the microscope can more than double the number of usable photons from GFP before bleaching. By subtly manipulating the molecule’s dark triplet state, this simple, sub-$10k modification extends the “photon budget” without
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