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Fluorescence staining techniques are frequently used in biological and medical research for diagnosis due to their high specificity and sensitivity. Lamps are widely used, however, these light sources have several drawbacks. They have a short lifetime, a long ‘warm-up-time’ and no possibility to focus the beam, as well as poor spectral and temporal resolution.

Here, lasers can provide a cost effective alternative. The beam is focusable, which provides additional selectivity. The single-photon-counting technique can be applied because of the possibility of performing ps-pulses. The lifetime is more than 10,000 h and the laser can be used immediately after switching it on. Due to the high spectral resolution, optical filters can be done without in many cases. Experiments with the new CAT-series of Sacher Lasertechnik demonstrate the superior behaviour of lasers.

Mouse fibroblast cells were labelled with antibodies specific for vimentin, which is part of the cytoskeleton. Bound antibodies are visualized via attached fluorochromes which, upon excitation with 405 nm blue laserlight, emit green light at 540nm. With its focus-technique, single parts of a cell can be viewed while other parts of the sample are not visualized and combined with the high power of the CAT-laser this also offers the opportunity, for example, to cut live cells. The beam divergence is below 5 mrad. No additional controller is needed to drive the laser. For further information, please contact us.