New activity (PSD module): inspection of the effect of the PSF on various intracellular structures

[tischi]

I think it would be great to image and create activities for:

1. membrane of a mitotic cell (effect: bright and crips on the sides, dimmer and more fuzzy on top and bottom) (we have this effect already in this activity, thus maybe we don't need to acquire more data)
2. membrane of an interphase cell (effect: one cannot resolve the two membranes at the leading edges of the cells)
3. microtubules (effect: elongated along the z-axis)
4. DNA (effect: nucleus appears fuzzy at top and bottom)
5. MORE?

[manerotoni]

I guess this belongs to image formation and artifacts?

Point 2, 3 and 4, are is inherent to resolution in XYZ, point 1 is due to degradation of the image when you go deeper (spherical aberration, less transparent material, ....).

I have a lot of images on NPC in 3D and there you see nicely that in the Z-direction is all fuzzy. Probably a better example than the DNA?

[tischi]

Yes, belongs to image formation.

And yes, probably they should all go into the PSF module.

NPCs are great because they are almost point-like and thus serve well to show the shape of the PSF. However, I think if we only show this for NPCs, there may be a misconception that only very small structures are affected. So I think it is good to also show how it affects larger structures, such as the nucleus which becomes fuzzy at the top and the bottom, but not at the side. So microtubules would only become fuzzy along the axis that is not the axis along which they are elongated.