Illumina Fiducials Are Pretty

Today I received a junk phase contrast microscope which I picked up for $50 from an auction site. I’ve been wanting to see if phase contrast imaging would help imaging flowcells as the approach gives much better contrast for transparent samples. My first experiments produced some quite attractive results (and matches up nicely with the SEM images I previously took):

This is from a NovaSeq 6000 (I think S4) flowcell, one of a batch Graham sent me. I’m on the look out for more old flowcells to image. So if you’d be will to send me some, all are most welcome (in particular any patterned flowcells).

Ping me on the Discord or at new@sgenomics.org!