Increasing speed and brightness in super-resolution microscopy with renewable fluorophores

Abstract

Fluorophore labels that transiently and repetitively bind to a target ("exchangeable" or "renewable" labels) lead to a continuous renewal of the fluorescence signal. This dynamic labeling approach minimizes photobleaching and was beneficially exploited in various super-resolution microscopy methods. Here, we report two new developments using exchangeable fluorophores: first, we report fast and long-time live-cell super-resolution microscopy using a weak-affinity protein label and a neural network. Second, we report a novel design for exchangeable DNA labels that show higher brightness and lower background. Together, these two developments further increase the application range for exchangeable fluorophore labels in super-resolution fluorescence microscopy.