LIQUITOPY®: A Liquid Tunable Microscope to Study Chromatin Organization in the Cell Nucleus

The possibility of integrating different light-matter interactions to form images in optical microscopy is the starting point for the design and realization of LIQUITOPY®, a ‘‘liquid tunable microscope’’. This could represent a new paradigm in data collection and image formation with a potential high impact in biophysics. Liquid takes inspiration from the philosophical and sociological speculation by Zygmunt Bauman [1] and tunable from the fact that, today, we have at our disposal methods allowing to “tune” the microscope across a large, almost unlimited, range of spatial and temporal resolution [2]. It is liquid because it aims to overlap in an efficient and optimized way different mechanisms of contrast and it is tunable because it offers a real time tunability regarding spatial and temporal resolution like a radio tuned on the preferred radio station. It is smart because can adapt the current configuration to the scientific question and is open to additional light-matter interaction modules. In our lab, we have implemented both classical and original solutions capable of managing most of the aspects of modern fluorescence microscopy. Important results have been obtained in single molecule localization methods [3], using STED-like configurations[4] and label-free approaches [5].