Science Lab

The knowledge portal of Leica Microsystems offers scientific research and teaching material on the subjects of microscopy. The content is designed to support beginners, experienced practitioners and scientists alike in their everyday work and experiments. Explore interactive tutorials and application notes, discover the basics of microscopy as well as high-end technologies – become part of the Science Lab community and share your expertise!

How to Prepare your Specimen for Immunofluorescence Microscopy

Immunofluorescence (IF) is a powerful method for visualizing intracellular processes, conditions and structures. IF preparations can be analyzed by various microscopy techniques (e.g. CLSM,…

Fluorescent Dyes

A basic principle in fluorescence microscopy is the highly specific visualization of cellular components with the help of a fluorescent agent. This can be a fluorescent protein – for example GFP –…

The Guide to STED Sample Preparation

This guide is intended to help users optimize sample preparation for stimulated emission depletion (STED) nanoscopy, specifically when using the TCS SP8 STED 3X nanoscope from Leica Microsystems. It…

The Fundamentals and History of Fluorescence and Quantum Dots

At some point in your research and science career, you will no doubt come across fluorescence microscopy. This ubiquitous technique has transformed the way in which microscopists can image, tag and…

Left: Tissue cells marked with an immunolabel (FITC) illuminated with wide-band UV excitation. Note the tissue structure with blue autofluorescence. Right: Same tissue and same immunostaining with FITC label illuminated with epi-illumination using narrow-band blue (490 nm) light. Note the increased image contrast (Ploem, 1967)

Milestones in Incident Light Fluorescence Microscopy

Since the middle of the last century, fluorescence microscopy developed into a bio scientific tool with one of the biggest impacts on our understanding of life. Watching cells and proteins with the…

Chronic Inflammation Under the Microscope

In the course of chronic inflammation certain body areas are recurrently inflamed. This goes along with many human diseases. With the help of widefield light microscopy, the underlying processes can…

Video Talk by Roger Tsien: Fluorescent Protein Indicators

In this talk, Roger Tsien discusses how fluorescent proteins have been turned into indicators for a wide variety of biological molecules, including pH, ions, redox potential, and signaling molecules…

Video Talk by Roger Tsien: Fluorescent Proteins

Live cell imaging has been revolutionized by the discovery of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). This lecture covers the history of GFP, how it folds and becomes fluorescent, how it has been mutated…

The Force of the Dark Side – Embedding Media for GSDIM Super-Resolution Localization Microscopy

Super-resolution microscopy such as Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) and single-molecule based techniques rely on the same principle for breaking the diffraction limit: the unwanted fluorescence…