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Halo · benchtop live-cell imager

Watch a cell for fourteen days.Without hurting it.

Book a bench demo See the 14-day data

Halo images four channels inside your incubator at a twelfth of the usual light dose, so the culture lives long enough to show you what it actually does.

Channel shown under the objective:
Light per frame
1/12of a standard widefield dose
Lateral resolution
0.6 µm20× air, phase + 3 fluorescence
Runs inside
Your incubator37 °C, 5 % CO₂, 95 % RH rated
Unattended
14 days96 wells, every 20 minutes

01 — Why

Most imaging is an autopsy. The light that shows you a cell is the same light that ends it. We built Halo to look less, and see more.

A compact automated imaging instrument lit in cold blue light on a laboratory bench.Fig. 1 — reference bench, not the Halo enclosure

02 — The instrument

One drawer. Four channels. No darkroom.

  1. 01

    Pulsed LED optics

    Each channel fires for exactly the exposure, never longer. The camera, not the specimen, does the waiting.

    12× less dose
  2. 02

    Phase-first autofocus

    Focus is found in label-free phase light, so fluorophores are only ever excited for a frame that counts.

    ±0.4 µm drift
  3. 03

    Lives in the incubator

    A 26 cm footprint slides onto an incubator shelf. Cables leave through the door gasket; the culture never moves.

    26 × 31 cm

03 — Fourteen days

The same cells, the same schedule. Different light.

Halo dose
93 %
Standard dose
4 %
  1. Day 003,000 cells per well, 96 wells. Four channels every 20 minutes.
  2. Day 04At a standard widefield dose the control plate stops dividing. Halo wells keep going.
  3. Day 08First wells reach confluence. Autofocus has held within 0.4 µm since seeding.
  4. Day 1494 % confluent. 1,008 frames per channel per well, and nothing in the dish noticed.
Confluence over fourteen daysWells imaged with Halo grow from 5 to 94 percent confluence. Wells imaged at a standard widefield dose track them until day four, then decline to about 4 percent.025507510002468101214
Confluence, % of well area, by day. Illustrative curves for a fictional instrument.

04 — Workflow

Seed it. Slide it in. Go home.

Halo was designed around the hours you are not in the lab. Setup is a plate and a protocol; everything after that is the instrument's job.

  1. A pipette dispensing pink medium into a clear 96-well plate.
    Step 1

    Seed a standard plate

    Any SBS-format 6 to 384-well plate, glass or polymer bottom. No proprietary consumables, ever.

  2. A scientist in blue gloves loads a multichannel pipette over a row of tubes.
    Step 2

    Pick a protocol

    Choose channels and an interval. Halo shows the projected light budget per well before you commit.

  3. A long, bright laboratory with benchtop instruments along both walls.
    Step 3

    Leave

    Frames stream to your server as OME-TIFF. A message reaches you only if focus, temperature or CO₂ drifts.

05 — Channels

Three colours and a light that costs nothing.

06 — Loan unit

Put Halo on your bench for one experiment.

We ship a loan unit, install it with you in an afternoon, and collect it after your time-lapse ends — not before. No purchase order needed to start.

  • Loans run 3 to 21 days
  • Shipped calibrated, plate adapters included
  • Your images stay on your network