What illumination systems does the confocal microscope have?
1) We have three lasers for producing confocal fluorescence images: an argon multiline laser that produces excitation lines at 458, 477, 488, and 514 nm; and two helium/neon lasers producing lines at 543 and 633 nm. In addition to using the lasers to capture and save confocal fluorescence images, any of the lasers can also be used to collect reflected-light images and transmitted-light images such as brightfield and differential interference contrast (DIC) . These, however, are not confocal. 2) There is a mercury arc lamp for doing conventional epifluorescence microscopy. Images produced using this lamp can be collected and saved. Typically their confocality is reduced compared with images produced by laser illumination. Given the laser module that we have, we are unable to excite UV fluors like DAPI with the lasers, but we can excite them with the mercury arc lamp. We have three filter sets for use with the mercury arc lamp, for visualizing fluors with emission spectra similar to thos
