Low temperature microspectrofluorometry: design of a 'cold chamber'.

Low temperature microspectrofluorometry allows an improvement of spectral resolution and an increase of fluorescence intensity. Suppression of fluorescence fading, or at least a marked reduction, is also obtained. A cooling chamber for microspectrofluorometric measurement is described which allows the cooling, under a microscope, of a biological sample down to liquid nitrogen temperature. Objectives with numerical apertures better than 1.0 and a magnification power up to 100X can be used. Low temperature measurements on a histological sample are presented and discussed.