>
> >This may be totally off the wall, but I recall that water has a very strong
> >first order Raman line. Can it be used to image water in this application?
>
> imaging of water might be a possibility. However I would anticipate that at
> the wavelengths required for Raman imaging you may see a lot of
> autofluorescence from the fungus as well. I'd stick to a simple experiment
> using one of the fluorescent tracers others have mentioned already. Many of

I dont understand this point. Raman emission occurs at a fixed energy lower
(or higher for anti-stokes emission) than the excitation. I do not remember
the exact numbers, but I seem to recall that for  350nm excitation,
the emission is somewhere around 390-395nm. This means that for 488nm
excitation, the Raman emission should appear somewhere around 570nm.
What am I missing?

If this is correct, then I have another question. Is it possible that
some of what passes for weak autofluorescence is really raman emission
from the mounting medium (or of the water in live cell preps)?
Perhaps someone with one of those new Leica
prism spectrometer  based systems can answer that by taking a spectrum
of the emission of unlabeled preps?

--aryeh
Aryeh Weiss                          | email: [log in to unmask]
Department of Electronics            | URL:   http://optics.jct.ac.il/~aryeh
Jerusalem College of Technology      | phone: 972-2-6751146
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Jerusalem, Israel                    | ham radio: 4X1PB/KA1PB