Unlock the "One Focus Per Well" Option for Slides. Please!

What is the challenge?

Tissue sections on slides are often not "perfect" samples. Sometimes they have air bubbles, very often you have a small cover slip that you want to detect by PreciScan.

The PreScan is very often done with the 5x objective, which is extremely robust against small focus changes between positions. But it is sensitive against focus failures due to air bubbles, coverslip borders or sealing glue components. Using the "One Focus per Well" option could have been the perfect solution to make a PreScan on a slide

1. Faster

2. Much more robust

For whatever reason, we have locked this option and we only make it available for plates. I think this is a huge mistake. We have sometimes even converted slides to plates using the plate setup wizard, to make this work.

What is the impact?

Some slides cannot be imaged with PreciScan, you get 5 focus failures in a row because there is a huge air bubble (outside the sample) or the PreScan hits the border of the cover glass and after 5 failures the slide is canceled.

Describe your idea

Very simple: unlock the "One Focus per Well" option that we do have for plates also for slides. I cannot see a reason not to do this. The users know what it means and that for a large area there is the chance to run out of focus. This is something that will usually be used with a long depth of focus objective in experiments (PreScan) that do not even require perfect focus.

Requested by

Jonas Schwirz, Field Application Scientist