Design and Construction of a Cost-Effective Spinning Disk System for Live Imaging of Inner Ear Tissue

Confocal imaging of fluorescent probes offers a powerful, non-invasive tool which enables data collection from vast population of cells at high spatial and temporal resolution. Spinning disk confocal microscopy parallelizes the imaging process permitting the study of dynamic events in populations of living cells on the millisecond time scale. Several spinning disk microscopy solutions are commercially available, however these are often poorly configurable and relatively expensive. This chapter describes a procedure to assemble a cost-effective homemade spinning disk system for fluorescence microscopy, which is highly flexible and easily configurable. We finally illustrate a reliable protocol to obtain high-quality Ca(2+) and voltage imaging data from cochlear preparations.