Figure 3

Lateral and axial plane auto-fluorescence images of the pollen taken by the APOM.

(a) For high-contrast axial plane imaging, the sample is illuminated by a thin laser sheet through the same objective lens (OBJ) used for image collection. The orange ellipsoid represents the sample. The laser sheet is generated by a pair of cylindrical lenses placed before the objective lens. The width of the laser sheet is about 2 µm. (b) A lateral plane image of the pollen, taken by a wide-field illumination using a mercury lamp. (c), (d), (e) are the axial plane images of three different cross-sections of the pollen as labeled in (b). The axial plane images have much higher contrast and better resolved features than the normal plane image because of the optical sectioning by light-sheet illumination. The scale bars are 20 µm.