Research on fluorescent semiconductor nanocrystals (also known as quantum dots or qdots) has evolved over the past two decades from electronic materials science to biological applications. We review current approaches to the synthesis, solubilization, and functionalization of qdots and their applications to cell and animal biology. Recent examples of their experimental use include the observation of diffusion of individual glycine receptors in living neurons and the identification of lymph nodes in live animals by near-infrared emission during surgery. The new generations of qdots have far-reaching potential for the study of intracellular processes at the single-molecule level, high-resolution cellular imaging, long-term in vivo observation of cell trafficking, tumor targeting, and diagnostics.

We present deep-learning-enabled super-resolution across different fluorescence microscopy modalities. This data-driven approach does not require numerical modeling of the imaging process or the estimation of a point-spread-function, and is based on training a generative adversarial network (GAN) to transform diffraction-limited input images into super-resolved ones. Using this Reprints and permissions information is available at www.nature.com/reprints.