HoloMonitor ® — A Cell Culture Microscope
The inverted HoloMonitor cell culture microscope facilitates label-free single-cell analysis on a population level in real-time. HoloMonitor operates within a CO2 incubator or hypoxia chamber, enabling long-term studies of in vitro cell populations in a stable and physiologically relevant environment. HoloMonitor non-invasively quantifies more than 30 cellular parameters reflecting:
- Cell proliferation
- Cell migration and invasion
- Cell morphology and differentiation
Cell-friendly long-term analysis
From just a single cell culture experiment you can learn how treatments affect the response and behavior of your cell culture samples. HoloMonitor is an incubator tolerant phase imaging microscope. This allows HoloMonitor to provide label-free cell culture analysis in an optimal environment over extended periods of time.
The inverted HoloMonitor cell culture microscope operates in a cell incubator, hypoxia chamber or directly on the lab bench.
Single-cell Analysis on a Population Level
HoloMonitor deploys quantitative phase contrast microscopy to non-invasively analyze cellular events by long-term digital phase imaging. While recording, the time-lapse image sequences are automatically analyzed to in real-time provide single-cell and population information in the form of graphs and scatterplots.
First point of investigation
Contrary to fluorescence microscopy, the cells are non-invasively imaged with a low power laser without labels or stains. This leaves the cells completely unaffected for further downstream studies using complementary instrumentation, for example, fluorescent imaging by high-resolution confocal microscopy.
Time-lapse Imaging
From within the cell incubator, HoloMonitor records multiple time-lapse image sequences of a cell culture sample. The data analysis can be done anywhere on a standard laptop, which has access to the recorded image data.
One sample, multiple results
By letting several HoloMonitor applications analyze the stored image sequences, a multitude of results is obtained from a single sample — saving time, effort and precious stem and primary cells.
A Cell Culture Microscope
for and by cell biologists
Designed by cell biologists, the HoloMonitor cell imaging software offers a simple and guided user interface with self-explanatory workflow, from experiment setup through data analysis. In addition, you can also easily create colorful videos and images. All data can of course be exported to Microsoft Excel for further analysis.
Peer-reviewed publications
Customers employ the HoloMonitor incubator microscope for cell culture analysis in a variety of fields within cell biology, including cancer research, drug discovery and stem cell research. To date, research results have been published in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications.
The HoloMonitor cell culture microscope quantifies living cells by measuring how light changes direction when passing through unstained cells. The cells are completely unaffected, as no light energy whatsoever is absorbed or transferred to the cells — no energy exchange, no change
Webinars
In this cell culture analysis webinar Kersti Alm, Head of Biology at PHI, demonstrates how to quantify cell movements and relate them to other cellular parameters, such as cell size and shape.
She shares results of the latest publications by scientists using HoloMonitor and highlights the great potential of simultaneously quantifying cell movement and morphology, for both single-cells and cell populations.
Sample Requirements
- The HoloMonitor assays neither require fluorescent proteins or labels, nor any specially designed vessels, making protocols straightforward and easy-to-use.
- A monolayer of adherent eukaryotic primary cells or cell line cells seeded in any of the recommended vessels.
- Customers have successfully used HoloMonitor with a large number of cell types, see peer-reviewed publication list.
References
Croft et al., Digital Holographic Imaging as a Method for Quantitative, Live Cell Imaging of Drug Response to Novel Targeted Cancer Therapies, Theranostics (2019)
