Smart lattice light-sheet microscopy for imaging rare and complex cellular events

Area of Science:

• Cell Biology
• Microscopy
• Immunology

Background:

• Biological processes occur across diverse spatiotemporal scales.
• Capturing rare or transient events is challenging with single imaging modalities.
• Long-term cellular phenotypes can originate from fleeting biological occurrences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an AI-driven microscope system for autonomous switching between imaging techniques.
• To overcome limitations in capturing rare biological events.
• To enable high-resolution, long-term imaging of complex cellular dynamics.

Main Methods:

• Development of smartLLSM, a microscope integrating AI for instrument control.
• Autonomous switching between epifluorescent inverted imaging and lattice light-sheet microscopy (LLSM).
• Application to study cell division and immune synapse formation in heterogeneous cell populations.

Main Results:

• smartLLSM provides population-level statistics across thousands of cells.
• Autonomously captures multicolor 3D datasets and 4D time-lapse movies of rare events.
• Quantified effects of Taxol on cell division and antigen strength on immune synapses.

Conclusions:

• smartLLSM efficiently detects and records rare events in heterogeneous cell populations.
• High spatiotemporal 4D imaging capabilities over statistically significant replicates.
• Enables detailed analysis of cellular processes previously difficult to capture.