CARSLab - NRC-Olympus Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering Microscopy Facility

On November 17, 2009, NRC and Olympus America Inc. officially unveiled the Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering Laboratory (CARSLab) in Ottawa, inaugurating equipment that uses novel microscopic techniques refined by NRC over the past five years and commercialized by Olympus this year. 

The NRC-Olympus CARSLab, located at 100 Sussex Drive Ottawa, offers state-of-the-art Multimodal imaging capability to prospective clients and collaborators. This facility provides traditional optical imaging techniques such as two photon fluorescence (TPF) second harmonic generation (SHG) and sum frequency generation (SFG) in combination with NRC-Olympus femtosecond CARS imaging technology.

The CARSLab facility can be used to observe both structures and processes in live cells and tissues in a label-free manner. As intracellular components are not naturally colour-coded, they may not look very different under a standard light microscope. Over the past century, researchers have developed dyes and stains that clearly contrast these intracellular components. However, stains may affect - in unknown ways - the exceedingly complex biochemical processes occurring in live cells. Ideally, one would not add any exogenous chemicals. CARS microscopy is an inherently label-free non-linear optical technique that makes use of molecular vibrational 'fingerprints'  (Raman spectra) as the contrast mechanism, “lighting up” the molecules that have the vibrational frequency of interest. At typical frame rates of two per second, CARS can make label-free movies of processes in live cells, without adding any dyes or stains that might alter these. Moreover, the new NRC-Olympus microscope routinely uses multi-modal imaging, meaning simultaneous CARS, second harmonic and two-photon fluorescence detection, giving multiple contrasting views of cells or tissues at a spatial resolution of around 300 nanometres.

See a description of the advantages of Non-linear Optical Microscopy and CARS.

To learn more about the CARS technique, see “CARS Microscopy Made Simple,” Biophotonics, October 2009, Optics Express 17, p 2984, 2009

CARSLab
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