Nanolive, a spinoff company of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, has just introduced a holographic microscope that can image live cells at high resolution over extended time periods.

Nanolive’s CX-A device relies on a low energy light beam to penetrate the sample, which does not interfere with internal cell activity. At every exposure, the system creates a 3D dataset of the sample, down to resolutions below 200 nanometers, which it can do repeatedly for hours at a time. Since entire 96-well plates can be imaged by the microscope, 96 individual experiments can be performed at once.

The system requires no cell preparation such as staining and doesn’t cause any phototoxicity or photo-bleaching in the samples.