Spinning Disk Confocal Microscopes

Spinning Disk microscopes contain a disk with multiple pinholes for confocal microscopy. The pinholes are arranged in such a way that spinning the disk will excite fluorescence in the hole filed of view. The disk can spin with several thousand rotations per minute resulting in an extremely fast confocal microscope.

Andor Spinning Disk Setup

This setup from Andor is optimized for high sensitivity and high speed confocal fluorescence microscopy. It is built on an inverted fully motorized Nikon microscope with a hardware based focus drift-correction (Perfect Focus). The setup contains a spinning disk from Yokogawa, two back-illuminated EM-CCD cameras (Andor iXON DU-897, 512 x 512 pixels, 16 bit, quantum efficiency > 90%, full well capacity 800,000 e, readout noise  < 1 e, 35 frames/sec @ 512 x 512) for simultaneous imaging of two channels, one sCMOS camera (Andor Neo sCMOS, 2560 x 2160 pixel, 16 bit, linear full well 30,000 e, read out noise 1 e, quantum efficiency > 55%, 100 frames/sec @ 2560 x 2160 pixel) for high speed/sensitivity/resolution widefield and fluorescence microscopy, and a scanning unit for simultaneous imaging and photo-manipulation. For imaging and photo-manipulation the setup provides six lasers (405nm, 445nm, 488nm, 515nm, 561nm, and 640nm). With this configuration the Andor spinning disk Setup is the best choice for fast live cell time-laps recordings including FRET and FRAP experiments. Due to the spinning disk the setup provides a confocal z-resolution.

Spinning Disk Stereology Setup

For details please see section Confocal Scanning Microscopes