ioLight's market data shows that there is a large addressable market for a lab quality portable microscope for professional field science. Vets, biologists, botanists, agronomists, mycologists, farmers and other professional microscope users repeatedly tell us that they love the portability, image quality and ease of use of the existing ioLight microscope. They also like ioLight's images displayed live on a mobile phone, tablet or computer, which makes them easy to share or paste into reports. However, they need 3 additional features: 1. Selectable optical magnification to give higher resolution and wider field of view 2. Dark-field, and oblique illumination for imaging transparent objects, such as cells and sperm 3. A translation stage for methodical scans of slides to count eggs, sperm and cells The purpose of this project is to develop such a lab quality portable microscope without compromising the portability and ease of use of the existing product. The project will culminate with testing prototype microscopes with 20 potential customers, and produce design recommendations for a product that will subsequently be built and sold by ioLight. This project is innovative because ioLight has realised that by using imaging technology that is now available at low cost from the mobile phone industry, it is possible to build a lab quality portable microscope to meet the needs of the professional scientist. This market is largely unserved. Current offerings are either large, heavy conventional lab microscopes in a flight case, which are impractical, or handheld digital microscopes which have insufficient magnification. Further technical innovation is adapting the illuminator to provide switchable bright field, dark field and other illumination options. Innovative methods will be developed to provide 3 optical magnifications without using 3 entirely different lens systems in each microscope. The project will cost £138,568 and last 16 months.

A small, low cost fluorescence microscope will be developed for biomedical R&D. Existing fluorescence microscopes are expensive, >£5000 & cumbersome. They target high quality quantitative fluorescence imaging for development of specimens tagged with fluophores, often via genetic engineering. As this tagging technology has become mature, researchers are now using fluorescence in larger scale applications which require a small, easy to use tool for qualitative sample screening. Eg Manchester University (Development (2014) 141, 1514-1525) use tadpoles genetically engineered to express fluorescent proteins to study anti-infective mechanisms - They told us that they need to screen many tadpoles for the best fluorescence and need a small low-cost fluorescence microscope to do this – no such tool is available. Many researchers (eg K.Hedges, Humbolt State University) are resorting to DIY which is time consuming. We will develop 3 demonstrations of portable low-cost fluorescence microscopes and get feedback from 30 users. ioLight will then use this information to build prototypes and them products for sale. Imaging and Microscopy reports the optical microscope market to be $1.7Bn in 2018

The basic design of the microscope has not changed since Galileo. Conventional laboratory microscopes produce beautiful images, but are expensive and difficult to use, particularly for younger student scientists and in the field. Low cost microscopes are available, but their images are not good enough for professional use and are unsatisfactory for teaching and training. ioLight has patented a pocket microscope, which will produce images with a resolution of better than 1m (1 micron = 1 thousandth of a millimetre). This means it can produce beautiful images of animal and plant cells clearly showing nuclei and other features inside the cell. This is the first truly portable high precision digital microscope and the UK patent office has recently completed a search validating this claim. Images are produced on the screen of a smart phone or tablet for easy sharing or projection onto a classroom whiteboard.