Using Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy to measure force generated by contractile actomyosin gels

Fluorescence microscopy has been a decades long workhorse for exploring fundamental questions about life. Within the field of soft matter, this modality can facilitate our exploration of life via reconstituted systems. With inspiration drawn from the OpenSPIM open-science platform we report on the design and construction of a multimodal light sheet fluorescence microscope capable of probing the dynamical nature of soft matter systems. Measuring forces in microscopy is a challenge due to the lack of innate contrast mechanisms that describe forces. We demonstrate the ability of this tool to measure total force in actomyosin gels by utilizing a method of mapping 3 dimensional displacements of fluorescent markers due to contractile forces generated by the gel.