New president of Bruker Optics division

Bruker Corporation has appointed Urban Faeh as President of its Bruker Optics division. He will also be appointed as Managing Director of Bruker Optik GmbH in Ettlingen, Germany, where he will be based. Bruker Optics analytical instruments include Infrared and Raman laboratory and process spectrometers, IR and Raman microscopy systems, as well as industrial time-domain NMR analyzers. Faeh has a Bachelor degree in Chemistry from the University of Applied Sciences Winterthur and a Master of Business and Engineering (MBE) degree from KS Kaderschule St.Gallen. After more than 10 years of experience in the food research and specialty chemical industries, Faeh joined Bruker in 1998 as Bruker Optics Sales Manager in Switzerland. In 2000, he was appointed Managing Director of Bruker Optics Switzerland, and later he also assumed regional sales management responsibilities for Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and the UK.

New biotech optics catalog includes microscopy products

Optical components provider Edmund Optics has released a catalog featuring product lines for researchers and product developers in the biotech field. Marisa Edmund, the company’s vice president of marketing says that experience in micro optics manufacturing, asphere production, and complex assemblies, coupled with expertise in thin-film coating design makes Edmund Optics uniquely qualified to service all areas of biotech research, development and production.

The company has more than 16,900 off-shelf-products and can also design and fabricate custom components. Some of the microscopy products in the catalog include a variety of objective lenses, broad-wavelength lens systems such as UV-NIR triplets that are useful for two-photon microscopy, and filters for various microscopy applications including filters with high damage thresholds.

Learn more on the company’s new biotech applications webpage. Request a print catalog here or view an interactive catalog here.

Compact ultrafast CARS light source

In recent years coherent anti-stokes Raman scattering spectroscopy (CARS) microscopy has been moving off of the optics benches and into real life science applications, increasing the demand for a turnkey light source. In response, APE and High Q Laser released the picoEmerald CARS light source at the LASER – World of Photonics tradeshow in Munich, Germany. The remote-controlled, hands-free one-box source provides pump- and stokes pulses perfectly overlapped in space and time.

A single housing contains the high-power 1064-nm picosecond oscillator with a frequency doubler and a synchronously pumped OPO. The optical modules were optimized to exhibit maximum passive stability.

Wavelength tuning can be performed automatically by PC. The three overlapping ultrafast pulse trains include 1064 nm out of the laser oscillator itself as well as 690 to 990 nm (signal range) and 1150 to 2300 nm (idler range) from the OPO. A synchronously-pumped OPO pumped by a mode-locked solid state laser means that the pulses show no timing jitter and a very low noise level.

The companies anticipate that microscopy companies will include this light source as part of complete CARS imaging systems in the future.

More information here.

Label-free microscopy for studying individual immune cells

Fluorescence methods have allowed scientists to label and follow single living cells with optical microscopy, revealing much about how cells work. However, the fluorophores used in these methods can be large and sometimes require invasive methods to get them into the cells, thus we don’t know how they really affect cell behavior.

Ideally, scientists would study cell behavior under conditions as close to natural as possible. Researchers at the University of Rochester have come closer to this ideal by creating an integrated Raman spectroscopy and angular-scattering microscopy (IRAM) system and using it to image unlabeled human live immune cells. The work is detailed in the latest issue of Applied Optics.

Raman spectroscopy provides chemical information about the sample, while angular-scatting microscopy acquires structural information. Together this is enough information to distinguish individual cells of different types.

The researchers were able to use the microscopy system to identify single granulocytes and peripheral blood monocytes -- two components of the human immune system. They next want to use the system to gather continuous data, which could allow the study of things such as how individual cells respond to various stimuli, to observe early changes in cells involved in an immune response or cancer, and to follow how cells change over time.

Applied Optics paper:
Zachary J. Smith and Andrew J. Berger, "Validation of an integrated Raman- and angular-scattering microscopy system on heterogeneous bead mixtures and single human immune cells," Appl. Opt. 48, D109-D120 (2009)