The ioLight compact inverted microscope is a sealed unit, whose small size allows for easy sterilisation and long term use in incubators or biosafety cabinets. The inverted microscope provides brightfield, darkfield and digital phase contrast imaging along with the capability to carry out timelapse or z-stack imaging. The ioLight compact cell imager with fluorescence adds to this the capability of detecting common experimental fluorophores (GFP, YFP, PI Propidium Iodide, SYTO9, DS Red).

Incubator microscopes allow for continuous monitoring of cell cultures, such as HEK-293, CHO or HELA cells, and provide insights into cell numbers, cell morphology, cell health and identification of contaminants, increasing the number of successful cultures. This is key for small to medium scale production of bio-therapeutics, like stem cells for personalised medicine, with fluorescent markers potentially being used to follow stem cell differentiation or for quantification of transfection in the production of therapeutics. Furthermore the use of an incubator microscope allows for experiments such as wound healing assays or chemotaxis can also be carried out directly in the incubator, providing a stable and contaminant free environment for long running assays or delicate 3D cultures such as organoids.