Super-Resolution Molecular and Functional Imaging of Nanoscale Architectures in Life and Materials Science

Abstract

Super-resolution (SR) fluorescence microscopy has been revolutionizing the way in which we investigate the structures, dynamics, and functions of a wide range of nanoscale systems. In this review, I describe the current state of various SR fluorescence microscopy techniques along with the latest developments of fluorophores and labeling for the SR microscopy. I discuss the applications of SR microscopy in the fields of life science and materials science with a special emphasis on quantitative molecular imaging and nanoscale functional imaging. These studies open new opportunities for unraveling the physical, chemical, and optical properties of a wide range of nanoscale architectures together with their nanostructures and will enable the development of new (bio-)nanotechnology.

Comparative performance of airyscan and structured illumination superresolution microscopy in the study of the surface texture and 3D shape of pollen

“…Reducing pinhole size from 1 to 0.2 AU improves the resolution by a factor of 1.4, using the point spread function (PSF) to dynamically reassign the photons gives a total improvement of 1.7 over the confocal resolution. The PSF refers to the image of each sub-diffraction and near diffraction fluorescent point source that defines the spatial resolution of the microscope (Allen, Ross, & Davidson, 2014;Habuchi, 2014;Jost & Heintzmann, 2013). The confocal and Airyscan image acquisition settings are provided in Table 1.…”

Structural Biology: A Century-long Journey into an Unseen World

“…It remains to be seen how widespread this new method of microelectron diffraction will become, especially as improvements in micro-focus synchrotron beamlines and the arrival of X-ray free-electron lasers may well bring crystals of this size within the reach of more conventional crystallography (Garman 2014 Super-resolution microscopy Light microscopists have returned to the structural biology fray in recent years with new 'super-resolution' techniques for imaging cells with visible light. These include methods such as stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED) and photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) (Habuchi 2014). The names hint at the sophistication of the techniques, the details of which are beyond the scope of this review.…”

Recent progress on single-molecule nanocatalysis based on single-molecule fluorescence microscopy

“…For a precise understanding of the structurereactivity relationship of the nanocatalysts, it is highly desirable to study the surface reactions at single-molecule or singleparticle level in real time. Recently, the newly-developed technique of single-molecule nanocatalysis based on single-molecule fluorescence microscopy has been proved to be effective for this goal [12][13][14][15][16][17] and has been used extensively as a new tool to study the catalytic properties of heterogeneous nanocatalysts at single molecule or single particle level [12,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29].…”