Recently, a research team led by Researcher Yang Fan from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully developed the world’s first high – spatiotemporal resolution stimulated Brillouin microscope.
While maintaining excellent imaging quality and high – spectral specificity, the system has increased the imaging speed by two orders of magnitude, achieving sub – millisecond temporal resolution and sub – micron spatial resolution three – dimensional mechanical imaging for the first time in the world. This provides an important tool for mechanical research in life sciences, and the related achievements have been published in the international academic journal Nature Photonics.
Brillouin microscopy is a new all – optical, non – contact, three – dimensional mechanical imaging technology with high spatial resolution, showing great potential in fields such as mechanobiology, ophthalmology, and tumor diagnosis. However, limited by the imaging speed, the Brillouin microscopy technology has been unable to perform relatively fast measurements.
To break through this bottleneck, Chinese researchers have developed a high – peak – power, low – duty – cycle pulsed fiber laser system with a wavelength of 780 nanometers and a peak power of 267 watts. Combined with a high – noise – suppression self – balanced detection scheme, it realizes a noise suppression of more than 31dB. Under an average power of 30 milliwatts, the system achieves an imaging speed of only 200 microseconds per pixel, leading the existing technical level.
Based on this, the researchers have verified the performance advantages of this system on multiple biological samples, including single cells, organoids, zebrafish embryos, and follicles. It is worth noting that using this microscope system, the research team has observed double Brillouin peaks in zebrafish embryos, revealing the mechanical differences in heterogeneous extracellular matrices and cavities.
During the embryonic development of Caenorhabditis elegans, the system has also captured the mechanical dynamic changes in early cell division in real – time, demonstrating excellent spatiotemporal resolution capabilities and biological application potential.
This research has broken through the technical bottlenecks of the imaging speed and sensitivity of traditional SBS microscopes, showing significant performance advantages in multiple biological models. The system is expected to become a new tool for revealing the mechanical mechanisms of life, exploring the occurrence of diseases and developmental dynamics, and promoting the expansion of Brillouin microscopy technology to a wider range of basic research and clinical application scenarios.
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