Leica Microsystems Wins German Award

The optical company Leica Microsystems (Wetzlar, Germany) has received its third German Business Innovation award for a high-resolution commercial microscope, the Leica TCS 4PI.

The company won the award in the medium-sized business category. The president of the company, Dr. Wolf-Otto Reuter, and the director of scientific relations, Dr. Thomas Zapf, received the award in Frankfurt (Germany) in January 2006. The company had previously won the award in 1984 for the Elsam acoustic microscope, as well as in 2002 for the DUV high-resolution microscope objective for photomask and wafer fabrication.

The Leica TCS 4PI is a fluorescence microscope, which enables submicroscopic, intracellular structures to be clearly imaged in three-dimensions (3D). Professor Stefan Hell, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen, Germany), invented the 4PI technology, developed for the market by Leica Microsystems, and gave the microscope its name.

An object is viewed by two high-quality objectives arranged opposite each other. This results in the object being observed with a practically complete spherical wave. In fluorescence microscopy this leads to a very narrow focus along the microscope axis with a resultant resolution of under 100 nm. It provides more structural information than other microscopes and can be used for research on protein-based diseases.

The microscope is being used at universities in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and the United States.





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