Low-cost light-sheet microscopy for whole brain imaging

Light-sheet microscopy has evolved as an indispensable tool in imaging biological samples. It can image 3D samples at fast speed, with high-resolution optical sectioning, and with reduced photobleaching effects. These properties make light-sheet microscopy ideal for imaging fluorophores in a variety of biological samples and organisms, e.g. zebrafish, drosophila, cleared mouse brains, etc. While most commercial turnkey light-sheet systems are expensive, the existing lower cost implementations, e.g. OpenSPIM, are focused on achieving high-resolution imaging of small samples or organisms like zebrafish. In this work, we substantially reduce the cost of light-sheet microscope system while targeting to image much larger samples, i.e. cleared mouse brains, at single-cell resolution. The expensive components of a light sheet system excitation laser, water-immersion objectives, and translation stage are replaced with an incoherent laser diode, dry objectives, and a custom-built Arduino-controlled translation stage. A low-cost CUBIC protocol is used to clear fixed mouse brain samples. The open-source platforms of Manager and Fiji support image acquisition, processing, and visualization. Our system can easily be extended to multi-color light-sheet microscopy.