Nikon’s Perfect Focus System ranked 2nd in the Top Innovations of 2008
December 4, 2008
‘Recognising winning combinations of invention, vision and utility’
Nikon Instruments’ exclusive Perfect Focus System (PFS) has been ranked second in the US life sciences journal, The Scientist’s top innovations of 2008 – its first ranking of the best innovations to hit the life science market in the past year. The Scientist asked a panel of expert judges to sort through the year's offerings and pick the ones likely to have the biggest impact. The judges – David Piston, Simon Watkins, Klaus Hahn, and Steven Wiley are all known for pushing the technical boundaries and have collectively published more than 700 scholarly articles.
Nikon’s PFS is the solution to focus drift – one of the biggest challenges in high resolution and live cell imaging, and is compatible with the innovative Ti inverted microscope series, launched at the end of 2007. "It's a really robust system," says Stephen Ross, senior scientist at Nikon, who was closely involved in the development of the PFS.
PFS is a hardware component that uses a half-moon shaped beam of infrared light to track optical offset and correct for it by sampling every 5 milliseconds. It holds focus both in time-lapse experiments and in short-term studies where acts such as perfusing a drug or moving a Z-stage might shift the sample. Similar systems exist, Ross says, but they don't work as well because they sample much less frequently.
Beaten only by a low-cost genome sequencing system, Nikon’s PFS is, according to judge Simon Watkins, Vice chairman and Head of the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, “... invaluable for any investigator performing microscope-based live cell analyses over an extended period of time. It maintains the specimens in focus regardless of temperature or vibration, such that you can conduct experimental manipulations (e.g., reagent injections) during imaging, and continue the experiment for days.” Fellow judge, David Piston, Professor of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics at Vanderbilt University, added, “The idea of autofocus has been around for a long time and many attempts to build a robust version have come and gone. This one really works and is totally transparent to the user.”
The Ti with PFS is already proving popular among our customers, according to Simon Ross, "We can't produce it fast enough – it's enabling experiments that just weren't possible before."
