Recent Developments in Super Resolution Fluorescence Microscopy

Abstract

A review. Recent developments in fluorescence microscopy techniques have broken the diffraction limit and achieved the spatial resoln. of sub 100 nm range. Satd. excitation (SAX) microscopy and stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy utilize saturable optical phenomena seen in laser excitation and stimulate emission of fluorescence mols. to induce strongly nonlinear optical effects for the resoln. improvement. Photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) applied photoswitchable fluorescence probes for precise measurement of positions of the fluorescence probes in a sample in a few tens of nanometer scale. This review introduces the principles and the characteristics of those super resoln. microscopy techniques with discussing the imaging formation and the resoln. limit in conventional microscopy techniques. [on SciFinder(R)]