Tech note: Benefits of water immersion lenses for HCS

Water immersion lenses provide: brighter images from HCS samples; faster and gentler imaging; higher quality images from both 2D and 3D samples.

When setting up an HCS assay, factors such as the resolution and sensitivity required to capture the sub-cellular detail, and the number of cells needed for robust statistics, must be weighed up against the need for speed or throughput.

Balancing the key factors in HCS imaging – sensitivity, resolution and speed – can be challenging since they cannot be optimised independently: changing one impacts the others. Nevertheless, there is a way to overcome some of the obstacles and, in this technical note, we explain why the choice of the objective lens is critical.

Learn how water immersion objective lenses:

• can provide significantly brighter images from typical HCS samples compared to air objectives
• allow a tenfold decrease in excitation energies and consequently much faster and gentler imaging
• increase the resolution and decrease optical aberrations, providing higher quality images from both 2D and 3D samples