Any one who’s ever owned a telescope has likely attempted hunting by means of the incorrect finish to see whether or not it functions in reverse—that is, like a microscope. Spoiler alert: It does not.

Now, a group of researchers inspired by the strange eyes of a sea creature has figured out a way to do it. By flipping the mirrors and lenses utilized in particular forms of telescopes, they have developed a new type of microscope that can be utilized to image samples floating in any form of liquid—even the insides of transparent organs—while retaining adequate light to let for higher magnification. The style could enable scientists reach higher adequate magnification to study tiny structures such as the extended, skinny axons that connect neurons in the brain or person proteins or RNA molecules inside cells.

“It’s good to see even one thing as simple as a lens could nevertheless bring interest and there is nevertheless area there to do some operate that would enable a lot of persons,” says Kimani Touissant, an electrical engineer at Brown University. He says the style could be valuable in his operate, in which he makes use of lasers to etch patterns into gels that mimic collagen and act as scaffolds for cells.

At pretty higher magnification, light educated on a sample can scatter about it, blurring and dimming the image. To get about that trouble, scientists utilizing regular, lens-primarily based microscopes cover their sample with a thin layer of oil or water, then dip their device’s lens into the liquid, minimizing the degree of light scattering. But this approach demands instruments to have distinctive lenses for distinctive forms of liquid, creating it an high-priced, finicky course of action and limiting the approaches that samples can be ready.

Enter Fabian Voigt, a molecular biologist at Harvard University and inventor of the new style. He was reading a book about animal vision when he encountered the odd case of scallops’ eyes. As opposed to most animals, whose eyes function retinas that send photos to the brain, scallops have mantles covered with hundreds of tiny blue dots, every of which consists of a curved mirror at its back. As light passes by means of every eye’s lens, its inner mirror reflects the light back onto the creature’s photoreceptors to generate an image that then makes it possible for the scallop to respond to its atmosphere.

An amateur astronomer given that he was a teenager, Voigt realized the scallop’s eye style resembled a type of telescope invented practically one hundred years ago named the Schmidt telescope. The Kepler Space Telescope, which orbits Earth, makes use of a comparable curved mirror style to magnify far-away light from exoplanets. Voigt realized that by shrinking the mirror, utilizing lasers for light, and filling the space involving the mirror and the detector with liquid to lessen light scattering, the style could be adapted to match inside a microscope.

So, Voigt and colleagues constructed a prototype primarily based on these specs. Light enters from the prime, passes by means of a curved plate that corrects for the mirror’s curvature, then bounces off a mirror to hit a sample and magnify it. The curved mirror can magnify the image a great deal like a lens, Voigt says. It makes it possible for researchers to appear at samples suspended in any type of liquid, simplifying the course of action. Voigt says the style could be especially valuable for researchers who study organs or even whole organisms, such as mice or embryos, that have been created fully transparent by artificially removing their pigment.

The researchers tested their prototype by shining a laser onto transparent samples which includes the muscle tissues in a tadpole’s tail, a mouse brain, and an whole chicken embryo. These photos, the researchers reported final month in Nature Biotechnology, have been as clear as these that could be accomplished with traditional optical microscopes, regardless of utilizing a easier style, and supplying much more flexibility in the way researchers prepare samples.

The mirror style could prove valuable to researchers aiming to trace the path of a mouse’s axons that wind all through the brain, says Adam Glaser, an engineer at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics who is functioning on brain mapping. Axons can be dozens of millimeters in length but only nanometers in width, which tends to make mapping the whole mouse brain a herculean process. It is also high-priced to do utilizing commercially offered microscopes, which demand various lenses and are finicky to operate. The new style, by contrast, could be much easier to use due to the fact it demands only a single mirror and, due to the fact it can image by means of any type of liquid, makes it possible for researchers to be much more versatile in how they prepare their brain samples.

Glaser adds that the new microscope could also help researchers hunting at RNA molecules inside the neurons that could reveal what genes every cell is expressing. “Borrowing from astronomy is a wonderfully effective and inventive way to do science,” he says.