Home built and designed microscopes utilize state of the art positioning and aquisition electronics.  High rate acquisition are done with an Avalanche Photodiode (APD) photodetector while numerous single molecules can be monitored simultaneously with a low-dark count CCD camera.  Flexible excitation sources include an air cooled Argon laser (Melles Griot) for continuous excitation at numerous discrete wavelengths.  A tunable Ti:Saphire laser is used for another single molecule system employed for  time-resolved fluorescent studies of single molecules.   Simultaneous two-wavelenth emission is performed with an image splitter and CCD camera.  One and two photon fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is also available for diffusion studies.

Home built microscope uses either the Andor CCD camera or a sensitive Avalanche photodiode to detect emission from single fluorescently labeled molecules.	Femto-second Ti:saphire provides a tunable excitation source for both Single Molecule and Time-resolved fluorescence lifetime measurements.  2 photon excitation of small sample volumes is also possible.

Detecting Single Lipid Vesicles

Fluorescent liposomes tethered on BSA coated coverglass: Calcium saturated Rhod-5N dye molecules were encapsulated in POPG: POPC (50:50) liposomes during lipid extrusion through a 400nm pore size membrane. This image was taken by an Andor iXon CCD camera. The excitation light source is a Melles Griot argon laser at 514nm (150uW). The background circle indicates the illumination area, which is 50um in diameter.