Montage of 16 adjacent and overlapping fields of living bone marrow derived macrophages imaged by phase contrast light microscopy. These cells are highly motile. Cells can be viewed interacting over a large field and specific details can be resolved at the resolution limit of light microscopy. For instance, lamella and ruffles are active where the cells are protruding. Phase dense organelles are visible inside the volumes of the cells.
Cells were extracted from a mouse femur and plated in a coverslip bottom well (MatTek) in standard culture media. The Olympus IX 71 microscope had a simple heated stage. Cells were imaged with a 60X N.A. 1.4 phase 3 planapo objective with a Cooke Sensicam QE operated by IP Lab software running on a Dell Windows XP computer. This picture was composed from 16 independent images using the automerge function of Photoshop CS2. The original 12 bits grayscale images were converted to 8 bits and some of the pixels are saturated.
| Spatial Axis | Image Size | Pixel Size |
|---|---|---|
| X | 3090px | 0.11µm |
| Y | 3938px | 0.11µm |
