Previous implementations of structured-illumination microscopy (SIM) were slow or designed for one-color excitation, sacrificing two unique and extremely beneficial aspects of light microscopy: live-cell imaging in multiple colors. This is especially unfortunate because, among the resolution-extending techniques, SIM is an attractive choice for live-cell imaging; it requires no special fluorophores or high light intensities to achieve twice diffraction-limited resolution in three dimensions. Furthermore, its wide-field nature makes it lightefficient and decouples the acquisition speed from the size of the lateral field of view, meaning that high frame rates over large volumes are possible. Here, we report a previously undescribed SIM setup that is fast enough to record 3D two-color datasets of living whole cells. Using rapidly programmable liquid crystal devices and a flexible 2D grid pattern algorithm to switch between excitation wavelengths quickly, we show volume rates as high as 4 s in one color and 8.5 s in two colors over tens of time points. To demonstrate the capabilities of our microscope, we image a variety of biological structures, including mitochondria, clathrin-coated vesicles, and the actin cytoskeleton, in either HeLa cells or cultured neurons.extended resolution | frequency mixing | multicolor | patterned excitation F luorescence microscopy allows noninvasive 3D imaging of the interior of living specimens with molecular specificity, and is therefore an invaluable resource to the biological sciences. Unfortunately, the resolving power of fluorescence microscopy is fundamentally limited by the diffraction of light.Lately, many techniques have been introduced to extend the resolution beyond the classic diffraction limit (1-8). Although the improvement of spatial resolution is impressive, the practical impact of these new techniques will largely depend on whether they can keep the two key advantages of fluorescence microscopy, namely, the capability of imaging living cells in three dimensions and multicolor labeling. Live-cell imaging over many time points has been demonstrated for some resolution-extending techniques (9-15) but, to our knowledge, not for multicolor 3D imaging of whole cells.Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy increases the spatial resolution by suppressing the fluorescence emission on the rim of a focused laser spot, theoretically enabling unlimited resolution (16). STED microscopy has been demonstrated for live imaging at high frame rates (12, 15), but its point-scanning nature makes it unsuitable for fast volumetric imaging over large fields of view. Furthermore, to achieve high spatial resolution, very high power densities (38-540 MW/cm 2 ) (12) are necessary for the STED laser beam, which may cause increased photobleaching and phototoxicity, thus limiting the application of live-cell STED microscopy.In localization-based microscopy, only sparse subsets of photoswitchable fluorophores in a sample are imaged at a time, which allows the isolation and precise localizati...