Mosaic is a patented instrument platform built around MEMS Digital Mirror Devices (DMD). DMDs were developed at Texas Instruments in 1987 and are now in widespread use in digital projectors and other display devices. The DMD comprises an array of individually addressable micro-mirrors that can be switched “on and off” (tilted) with MEMS “hinge” elements. DMD arrays contain hundreds of thousands to millions of micro-mirrors.
Mosaic exploits DMD in a proprietary programmable platform, integrated with scientific light sources including lasers, LEDs and arc lamps, and operates from 360 to 800 nm. It is offered with a range of high performance microscope adapter optics and can be integrated with CLSM, spinning disk and wide field imaging modalities.
High speed frame switching (60 Hz) makes Mosaic suitable for many dynamic applications including
bleaching, uncaging, photoswitching, optogenetics and constrained illumination. Variable intensity
distributions can be achieved by rapid gating of mirror patterns.
Mosaic has a unique capability to illuminate in parallel an arbitrary number of complex regions (sometimes called “zero delta t”) that sets it apart from galvo-based devices and makes it especially attractive for uncaging, photoswitching and light activation. It is a unique tool for the study of optically stimulated intra and inter-cellular activity in neuroscience and physiology, as well as for function-structure studies with photoswitching fluorescent proteins. Mosaic uses dichroic coupling to the microscope light path and is therefore capable of simultaneous stimulation and imaging.
The core of Mosaic is the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), a high speed and highly efficient semiconductor-based "light switch" array of hundreds of thousands hinge-mounted, addressable, tiltable, microscopic mirrors. When a DMD chip is coordinated with a digital video or graphic signal, a light source and beam delivery optics its mirrors reflect a digital image of the illumination mask onto the sample.
Some photosensitive proteins can be activated with one wavelength of light and deactivated, or “silenced”, with another. This property is exploited in the Mosaic Duet e.g. to sharpen control over protein localization. A second light source is coupled into the DMD at a complementary angle to the primary. In this configuration pixels NOT selected for activation define an inverse mask which can be illuminated to "silence" molecules outside of the activation region(s) or those diffusing away.
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