TIRF

Today was "fix the TIRF microscope" day. That means I spent 5+ hours at the microscope imaging different samples under TIRF microscopy. For the layperson reading this, TIRF is an acronym that stands for Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence. It's conceptually rather easy and in practice not much more difficult. That said, the fluorescent bead solutions used to calibrate it show up fine. But when I try to image our cells the signal is very low and there's a band structure across the image. That might have been the special coverslip I used introducing interference effects in the laser beam but when using the same coverslip with the fluorescence beads there's no such band structure, so it must be something about the cells themselves. Warrants further investigation; ie. call the Olympus Techs for help