The Technology
Modern microscopy techniques used in life sciences enable the recovery of subwavelength features, even though such information is absent in the actual measurements. More specifically, the techniques known as STED, PALM and STORM rely on fluorescence to achieve this resolution improvement, which has enabled imaging of subcellular features and organelles within biological cells with unprecedented resolution (20-50nm).
Many fluorescence imaging techniques rely on attaching fluorescent molecules to regions of interest within the specimen. Although these techniques enable imaging of sub-cellular organelles with unprecedented resolution and clarity, they share a common drawback in terms of the temporal resolution: the time it takes to acquire all the data needed to recover a full image. PALM/STORM require tens of thousands of exposures, leading to a long acquisition cycle, typically on the order of several minutes.
The new method – SPARCOM, manages to reduce the total integration time by several orders of magnitudes compared to commonly practiced methods by relying on sparse recovery and the uncorrelated emissions of fluorescent emitters. SPARCOM produces sub-diffraction images of biological specimen.
Advantages
- High spatio-temporal resolution
- Short acquisition cycle
Applications and Opportunities
- Biological research on living cells: stand-alone super-resolution microscopy software for analyzing diffraction limited epi-fluorescence microscopy sequences and software for data analysis
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