Scientists could save thousands with student’s DIY microscope

Expensive tests for measuring everything from sperm motility to cancer diagnosis have just been made hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper by a PhD student from Brunel University London who hacked his own microscope.

Adam Lynch, from the university’s College of Health and Life Sciences, created his own inverted microscope by adapting a cheap instrument he bought online to save himself time and money.

The tool is used to measure cell motility – how fast cells move from one place to another – but the high-quality equipment, used to automatically test multiple samples, can stretch to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

more…

> by adapting a cheap instrument he bought online

These look virtually identical to the $27 one I recently bought online. You get no better than about 0.12 mm per pixel (110 microns) before digital zoom, and digital zoom does not improve the resolution. Neither does changing the direction of lighting. And he needed a PhD to do this?

mollwollfumble said:

> by adapting a cheap instrument he bought online

These look virtually identical to the $27 one I recently bought online. You get no better than about 0.12 mm per pixel (110 microns) before digital zoom, and digital zoom does not improve the resolution. Neither does changing the direction of lighting. And he needed a PhD to do this?

He’d probably be on the street begging otherwise

doesn’t appear you need good resolution.

Adam, who estimates the cost of his system to be around £160 but thinks it could be made cheaper still, said: “When you’re looking at motility in cells you’re only interested in the data – how fast the cell gets from A to B means more than a high-resolution image. Even with a high-cost microscope you will reduce the image down so that it’s just a black dot on the screen moving against a white background so that it’s easier for a computer to read.”