Researchers from the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, Stockholm and Uppsala University have developed a small, 3D printed microscope fitted to a phone to assist DNA-sequencing in tumour cells and tissue samples.
The lightweight optical attachment is coupled with a standard smartphone camera. They produced the device using a 3D printer, it captures multi-colour fluorescence and bright-field images, reported phys.org.
Using the device involves placing a tissue sample in a small container, the mobile phone microscope then records multi-mode images of the processed sample and feeds data to an algorithm, which automatically examines the images to read the sequenced DNA bases.
