From Antarctica to the International Space Station: 20 years of CoolLED illumination
What started with four people and a new idea for fluorescence microscopy has travelled rather further than anyone might have expected. Twenty years later, CoolLED Illumination Systems can be found on every continent on Earth. And, apparently, seven continents weren't quite enough.
Three wavelengths. Four people. One fairly big idea.
In the summer of 2006, a team of four from CoolLED arrived at the Microscience meeting in London with something new: the world's first commercially available LED Illumination System for fluorescence microscopy.
At the time, fluorescence microscopy still relied heavily on mercury and metal-halide lamps. The original CoolLED system, the precisExcite, offered three discrete wavelengths and introduced microscopists to another way of doing things.
LEDs offered long lifetimes, stability and precise electronic control, without the warm-up times and short bulb lifetimes associated with traditional illumination.
It was a new idea in 2006. It didn't take very long for that idea to start travelling.
Since that first launch, CoolLED Illumination Systems have travelled far beyond our home in Hampshire.
Today, our light sources are used in research laboratories, hospitals, imaging facilities, universities and integrated scientific instruments around the world.
An early connection with Antarctica
One of the nicest details in CoolLED's early history appeared only months after that first launch.
In January 2007, an email arrived at CoolLED from Sandra McInnes at the British Antarctic Survey after spotting a flyer for the new precisExcite system in Microscopy and Analysis.
She was asking about converting existing epifluorescence microscopes to LED illumination. Crucially, those microscopes were being used both in Cambridge and in Antarctica.
Antarctica wasn't some much later box-ticking milestone. It was already there in the CoolLED story near the very beginning.
For a company whose first commercial system had only just launched, that was a rather lovely indication of how far the idea might travel.
Microscopy at the extremes
Nearly twenty years later, microscopy is still helping scientists investigate how Antarctic organisms function in conditions that would cause serious problems for most other life.
A current British Antarctic Survey and University of Cambridge project is developing live-cell imaging techniques for temperatures around 0°C and below, using cells from the Antarctic plunderfish, Harpagifer antarcticus.
“We will take some of the most advanced imaging tools available and, for the first time, adapt them to work with Antarctic species.”
British Antarctic Survey, Dynamic Live Cell Imaging at Sub-zero TemperaturesApparently Earth wasn't quite far enough
In 2020, a CoolLED pE-300white travelled considerably further, becoming part of JAXA's Confocal Space Microscopy system, COSMIC, aboard the International Space Station.
Working with our long-standing Japanese reseller Givetechs, the pE-300white was integrated alongside a Leica DMi8 microscope to provide widefield fluorescence illumination for biological imaging experiments in microgravity.
High irradiance, stability and compact size were all important factors in its selection. But above all else, consistency and reliability carried particular weight.
Once a microscopy system is in orbit, there is no quick service visit and no spare unit sitting in the next room. You can't exactly pop back to Earth to fix it. The illumination has to perform predictably and consistently, and keep doing its job for as long as it is needed.
CoolLED in orbit
And what comes next?
Twenty years have brought an extraordinary amount of change in LED technology, product design and the applications our illumination systems support.
And with AI changing the speed at which new ideas can be developed, tested and put into practice across science and technology, it's difficult to predict what the next twenty years will bring. We're looking forward to finding out.
