| 研究実績の概要 |
A major advance this year was implemented in the telemicroscope setup, which has a spectrophotometer head and a side port. Two images from different focal planes and a spectrum from a defined region can be recorded simultaneously. We used the setup for hyperspectral imaging of eye reflectance and fluorescence, corneal/ tissue slide transmittance and for rhodopsin dynamics. The spectroscopy and dynamic pupil activation experiments on Curetis acuta revealed that the long wavelength rhodopsin peaks at 575 nm. Furthermore, by analyzing the pupils of individual ommatidia to spectral stimulation, we found five to six clusters of ommatidial types, consistent with three short-wavelength receptor classes. The method is certainly a promising tool for studying butterfly eyes with red eyeshine. We thus applied the method to several lepidopteran species including a skipper and two hawkmoths.
Another advance was in building light stimulation device using LEDs. We developed an image analysis method using the device for estimating pigment concentrations in a hyperspectral image stack. To validate the device as a biomedical tool, we measured blood oxygenation in the frog skin: Dr Pirih published the results (Belusic et al. Sci rep, 6:32012, 2016). We now have a two-register LED synthesizer with anamorphic optics and a depolarizer in Sokendai, which Dr Pirih assembled successfully during his extended stay for 2 months. This will be a powerful research tool in my laboratory in coming years.
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