Broadband lensless holographic microscopy for bioimaging from deep UV to near IR using a regular camera (Invited Paper)

We introduce a broadband lensless holographic microscopy platform that repurposes a standard visible-range board-level camera for low phootn budget coherent bioimaging from the deep UV (≈240 nm) to the near IR (≈1100 nm). Using a simple lensless geometry and wavelength-tailored illumination, the same low-cost sensor provides label-free, high-throughput imaging over a centimetre-scale field of view. In the deep UV, intrinsic absorption of nucleic acids, proteins and retinoids enables chemically specific imaging of extracellular vesicles, yeast and liver tissue (e.g., screening for retinoid-rich Ito cells). In the near IR, reduced scattering allows imaging through highly turbid samples, including clearing-free mouse brain slices (up to 250 µm thick), and mouse liver tissue slices unravelling anatomical cellular structures, otherwise invisible in the visible range illumination regime. This work highlights a compact, scalable route to broadband Gabor holographic bioimaging with a regular camera.