Leica Thunder Model Organism Macroscope

Installed in November of 2019, the Leica Thunder Model Organism Microscope is a fluorescent motorized stereomicroscope for imaging color or black and white images and movies of large thick samples.  Built upon the fully motorized Leica MC205FA stereomicroscope, it incorporates Leica’s proprietary Computational Clearing algorithm to produce deep Z stack images with near-confocal clarity while utilizing the speed of a widefield camera system.  Equipped with 4 fluorescence filter wheels and 3 brightfield modalities utilizing Leica

Triple Beam technology, multichannel images can be acquired with an ultra-sensitive sCMOS camera. Alternatively, color images can be acquired with a second dedicated 5 megapixel color CCD camera.  With an XY interface range of 160 X 110 mm, as many as 8 microscope slides can be imaged automatically in either fluorescent or brightfield color modes.  The large flat transparent stage also easily accommodates round or square petris and all types of multiwell plates.  In addition, an incorporated gooseneck lamp allows for imaging of reflected light for opaque samples and small animals.  Z drive is fully automated, and has a 420 mm travel range with a resolution of 1 µm.  The system incorporates two objectives that together provide a magnification range from 7.8X to over 600X.  The 5X macro lens provides parallax-free imaging with a working distance of 19mm.

This instrument is ideal for all types of model organism analyses; including live screening for fluorescent protein transformants, scanning and recording brain slices, tile scanning entire mouse embryo slices at high resolution, rapidly producing highly resolved Z stacks of up to 500 µm, and setting up time lapse experiments at very low light for photosensitive samples.