MICROSCOPY Vol.47▶No.4 2012
■Researches Today

The Technologies and the Applications of Super Resolution Microscopy

Yoshiro Oikawa

General Manager, Application Engineering Department Bio Science Sales Division, Nikon Instech., ltd.

Abstract: Conventional microscopes have the resolution limit of approximately 200 nm due to the diffraction limit. To break this limit, a lot of approaches have been suggested. Recently, several approaches are applied into the microscopes by manufactures and became available in the market.
“Structured Illumination Microscope (SIM) ” is the one of those approaches that enables us to get super resolution fluorescent images with the resolution of approximately 100nm laterally and 300nm axially. In SIM microscope, the illumination pattern is “stripe patterned” illumination which is called “structured illumination”. With this pattern of illumination, the small structure information is acquired as “moiré effect”. By analyzing these acquired image data, a super resolution image is generated.
“Localization Method” is another approach to get super resolution image. This is based on single-molecule-imaging. Using photo-activatable dyes, molecules are stochastically activated and dots localizations are recorded. Repeating this process, super resolution image is generated by accumulating dots. This approach gives the resolution of approx. 20 nm laterally, 50 nm axially.

Key words: Optical Microscope, Super Resolution Microscopy, SIM, Localization Method