Question: What is a confocal microscope?

Kylie Belchamber answered on 19 Jun 2016:

It is basically a fancy microscope. It shines a laser light on some cells that have been dyed with a fluorescent dye. This dye absorbs part of the light and it excites the elections to change slightly. The dye will then start to send another light back that is of a lower energy from the first light, and so is a different colour. This is how lasers and fluorescence works.
It also uses a pinpoint light source and lots of lenses to try and minimise the light that isnt from the pinpoint area. It means you can get very precise fluorescent measurements about your cells.

It is quite complicated physics that i dont fully understand, but allows us to see different parts of the cell, like the nucleus, the cytoplasm and the cell wall by dyeing them all different colours. The pic on my profile page under work shows a confocal microscope picture of some macrophage that have eaten bacteria. The pics can be pretty amazing!