The discovery of Piezo technology was discovered in 1880 by brothers Jacques and Pierre Curie. Consequently, piezo-based nanopositioners became a key contributor to the development of SRM techniques. Furthermore, they were widely used in other high-resolution imaging techniques such as SEM and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Fortunately, piezo-based positioning systems – with nanometer resolution – were commercially available during the first phase of SRM development. Improvement in resolution achieved by SRM techniques was ten-fold and the capability to position samples and objectives with precision was identified as a key requirement to create such systems. Due to necessity, the first generation of these instruments was built in-house by physicists by promoting standard parts from other microscope platforms. These research areas were being held back by diffraction-limited image resolution – new methodologies were made better by combining selective labeling with the ability to distinguish co-localized molecules of interest using spectrally separated fluorescent dyes.Ĭomparable with other new research tools, the progress and primary driver of SRM technologies has been academia with a large number of the systems being used today having their genesis directly from research labs or via university spin-off companies. The increased popularity of SRM has therefore encouraged a large number of laboratories to reconsider and revise their imaging-based research in areas such as intracellular transport and cell division. While there are many benefits to using these optical microscopy systems, one noticeable advantage is that unlike alternative methods that offer comparable resolution – such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) – SRM techniques can be used to investigate metabolic interactions in living cells. Since commercially available super-resolution systems became accessible, SRM techniques now allow cell biologists to non-destructively investigate cellular structures in previously unattainable detail, with its use growing at a rapid rate. What’s more is that this advanced technique has greatly expanded the understanding of many intracellular processes and molecular interactions. Moerner being awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This development garnered much praise and eventually led to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Super-Resolution microscopy did not really get the recognition it warranted until about 15 to 20 years ago, when researchers began merging a number of separate super-resolution technologies, including 4Pi, light sheet, PALM (photoactivation localization microscopy), STED (stimulated emission depletion), and STORM (stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy) – to produce modernized systems that could achieve spatial resolutions down to around 20 nanometers. This method, first proposed back in 1978, overcomes the so-called Abbe diffraction limit – posited by German physicist Ernst Abbe over 100 years prior in 1873 – permitting structures of less than 200 nanometers to be detected with fluorescence-based light microscopy. Through further development of super-resolution microscopy (SRM) renewed interest in the use of optical microscopy has been generated across a good number of life sciences research, notably molecular cell biology and neuroscience. We explore how nanometer precision, positioning and measuring technology has given a much-needed boost and opened the door to rapid progression in this field, and the importance of nanopositioning for Super-Resolution microscopy applications. Over the past twenty years, significant advances in the field have led to the obtaining of images at a much higher resolution, swift processing times, and insight into the functionality of molecular machines within cells. Super-Resolution microscopy is a particularly useful approach that allows for enhanced observations into intracellular interactions and processes at a molecular level. Sponsored by PI (Physik Instrumente) LP Sep 24 2019
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