Optical tomography complements light sheet microscopy for in toto imaging of zebrafish development

Abstract

Fluorescently labeled structures can be spectrally isolated and imaged at high resolution in living embryos by light sheet microscopy. Multimodal imaging techniques are now needed to put these distinct structures back into the context of the surrounding tissue. We found that the bright-field contrast of unstained specimens in a selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM) setup can be exploited for in vivo tomographic reconstructions of the three-dimensional anatomy of zebrafish, without causing phototoxicity. We report multimodal imaging of entire zebrafish embryos over several hours of development, as well as segmentation, tracking and automatic registration of individual organs.