Hi there from the President’s office at Mizar Imaging, LLC!
The Mizar Story
Mizar was born from necessity; my wife (the outstanding scientist Amy Shaub Maddox) needed a light sheet for imaging cytokinesis at high frames rates. My technician (now Ph.D. student) Tanner Fadero and I set about to build a copy of the Eric Betzig Bessel beam based light sheet system.
After working at a Bessel beam light sheet for a few months, we came to the conclusion that the utility of this design did not fit our needs. Specifically, we wanted to image with high numerical aperture for increased resolution and brightness. The added benefit of this, and not a minor motivating factor was that we could use objective lenses that we already owned; 60x, 1.4NA, 100x, 1.49NA, etc., which saved us A LOT of money. The obvious requirement is then is to mount on a coverslip and for this, we might as well use our existing inverted microscope stands (also saving money). After much deliberation (and admittedly LITE beer), we landed on the Tilt solution, based on LITE technology. I’ll refer you to our blog post on how the Tilt works and our JCB paper on the topic (Fadero, et. al., 2018) for the details.
The Tilt and a Partnership was Born
After working out a prototype, we partnered with Cairn Research (Kent, England) and in particular Jeremy Graham and Tom Parrado. Cairn did a masterful job in designing (with our input 🙂 ) what is now the Tilt, a light sheet solution that can be added to existing inverted microscopes for use with high NA objectives. We are proud to say that, to our knowledge, no other commercial light sheet can use oil immersion lenses. We are a solution driven team of scientists (5/5 employees have STEM degrees, 4/5 Ph.D’s) whose goal is to enable light microscopy in biological sciences. If you have a high-resolution bleaching problem, give us a call! We are more than happy to demo for you onsite.
Happy light sheet imaging!
Paul Maddox, PhD
Founder and President, Mizar Imaging