Optical Projection Tomography for In-Vivo Imaging of Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Optical projection tomography is a recently developed tomographic technique used to acquire 3D microscopy data from specimens 1-10 mm thick. In previous work, to reduce scattering and attenuation the specimens were fixed and cleared, but clearing makes in-vivo fluorescence OPT of the sample impossible. We present a novel OPT technique for obtaining 3D images of both anatomy and fluorescent-protein expression in vivo, and we apply these techniques to gene expression mapping of Drosophila melanogaster development. We believe this approach will prove useful for in-vivo follow-up measurements of gene expression patterns in mm-sized samples, traditionally unavailable when using imaging techniques such as confocal microscopy.