Transverse Sheet Illumination Microscopy

Recording the neural activity of biological organisms is paramount in understanding how they process the world around them. Fluorescence microscopy has served as the standard in recording this neural activity due to its ability to capture large populations of neurons simultaneously. Recent efforts in fluorescence microscopy have been concentrated in imaging large scale volumes, however, most of these efforts have been limited by spatiotemporal and bandwidth constraints. We present a novel system called Transverse-Sheet Illumination Microscopy (TranSIM), which captures spatially separated planes onto multiple two-dimensional sCMOS sensors at near diffraction limited resolution with 1.0 µm, 1.4 µm, and 4.3 µm (x, y, and z respectively). The parallel use of sensors reduces the bandwidth bottlenecks typically found in other systems. TranSIM allows for the capturing of data at large-scale volumetric field-of-views up to 748 × 278 × 100 µm ³ at 100 Hz. Moreover, we were able to capture smaller field-of-views of 374 × 278 × 100 µm ³ at a faster volumetric rate of 200 Hz. Additionally, we found that the system’s versatile design allowed us the ability to change the vertical magnification programmatically rather than necessitating a change of objectives. With this system we were able to observe intricate communication between neuron populations separated by vast three-dimensional distances, raising the potential to answer complex questions in Neurobiology.