This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three researchers who developed ways to capture images of living cells at nanoscale resolution — well below the 200 nanometres thought to be the best possible resolution for visible-light microscopes. (...)
A fourth recently-developed super-resolution technique, called structured illumination microscopy (SIM), illuminates samples with stripes of light. A computer program analyses the interference patterns formed by the stripes (usually combining composite pictures with stripes in different orientations) to reconstruct a picture of a cell at about double the resolution limit of optical microscopy. This SIM image shows a three-dimensional view of a human bone cancer cell with actin in purple, DNA in blue, and mitochondria in yellow.
by Richard Van Noorden, Nature | Read more:
Image: Dylan Burnette/NIH/Courtesy of Nikon Small World
