Introduction

Reference: Minimal reproduction and calibration of a fluorescence microscope for single-cell imaging

Purpose

Microscopy is a critical experimental tool in life sciences. However, when attempting to reproduce or scale-up a published method, researchers often meet difficulties in implementing specific protocols, often because they do not have full control over the hardware and software.

To address these challenges, we present a modular open-source hardware and software pipeline that integrates automation and database management.

We provide comprehensive guidance on building and calibrating the microscope hardware, implementing automation, and data analysis and storage methods. The highly modular Python software we introduce facilitate customization and reusability beyond microscopy, empowering researchers and engineers to adapt components for other scientific applications.

The microscope presented here is a simplified and open-source version of the microscope used in this publication. The 3D structure was derived from the Open-UC2 library.

In this repository we provide:

License

Copyright (C) 2025 Sony Computer Science Laboratories

You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This project is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

This work was supported by the European Innovation Council Pathfinder Open DREAM (grant no. 101046451)