Concept and implementation of a compact multi-channel fluorescence-microscope unit

Due to the large number of single experiments in systems biology there is a demand for accelerating image acquisition. We present the concept and the implementation of a compact multi-spectral microscope unit, which is able to acquire images of four fluorophores in parallel. The unit consists of four excitation channels and four emission channels realized by dichroic filters. The imaging is performed by one standard objective lens for all channels and one tubus lens and one camera for each emission channel. By combining multiple units, a parallelization in the spatial domain can be achieved.