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Hello David,

When you work on gold surfaces - you need to consider the quenching of
your flurophores by the conducting gold surface. Actually I'm quite
surprised that you see fluorescence at all on your samples. I work quite
a lot with surface people and we basically gave up to image fluorescence
on gold surfaces by conventional microscopy (on the other hand there are
special systems - like surface plasmon resonance microscopy where gold
surfaces are very useful).
The background stripes you see with the confocal may be some kind of
surface plasmons - and I'm not aware of any method you could get rid of
it without sacrificing your gold coating (they may be generated by the
intensive laser irradiation). If you don't see these stripes in a
conventional epifluorescence setup - why not to use such a system for
imaging? In the investigation of surface related processes a confocal is
not necessarily needed.

Cheers    Gabor

--
Gabor Csucs PhD
Light Microscopy Centre ETH Zürich
Inst. of Biochemistry
ETH Hönggerberg HPM D 8.1
http://www.lmc.ethz.ch

Tel:41-1-633-6221
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