Oosight microscope enables embryonic stem cell br...(material from the skin cells of an adult...)

We are thrilled that the Oosight worked for enucleating monkey eggs, says Keefe. We already had shown at the MBL, in 2000, that the technology developed by Dr. Oldenbourg facilitated noninvasive enucleation of mice eggs. At that time, Keefe operated a research lab at the MBL and directed the Division of Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I. Keefe is presently professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of South Florida College of Medicine.

Before, the problem was always that you could not see the spindle in the egg, Mitalipov says. The only way to see it was to stain it with dyes. And that, we found, was very detrimental for egg quality. The Oosight uses liquid-crystal polarized light technology to image the spindle noninvasively, with high contrast and quality.

You can actually look in the Oosight microscope and see the spindle with your eyes, not frozen as a computer screen image, says Mitalipov, which is critical for the next step: taking the spindle out of the egg. You cant manipulate the egg while looking at a computer screen. You have to look at the egg. The Oosight, plus very skilled micromanipulations of the eggs, gave us a 100% success rate with enucleating.

The Oosight is based on technology that is the result of decades of MBL research pioneered by Distinguished Scientist Shinya Inou. In the 1950s, Inou was one of the first cytologists to make extensive use of the polarized light microscope to observe birefringent components of the cell, which led to his landmark discovery in 1951 of the meiotic spindle fibers in living cells. He later showed that dynamic disassembly of the s
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