Fluorescence microscopy is a research technique that relies on the excitation of fluorescent molecules with a specific wavelength region to produce an image generated by the secondary fluorescence emission at longer wavelengths. Fluorescence microscopes are equipped with reflected light illuminators that incorporate neutral density filters and a specialised combination of interference filters to segregate incident illumination from the detected fluorescence emission.

The advantage of fluorescence for microscopy is that you can often attach fluorescent dye molecules to specific parts of your sample, so that only those parts are the ones seen in the microscope. You can also use more than one type of dye. By changing the excitation light, you can cause one type of dye to fluoresce and then another to distinguish two different parts of your sample. Examples of this are different cell types within a tissue or different targets within a cell.

Techniques used for brightfield imaging include phase contrast and differential interference contract.

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