Optical Nanoscopy
Optical Nanoscopy: How time is used for single molecule detection
Beating the diffraction barrier (~200 nm) to resolve structures at the (macro)molecular level in conventional light microscopes requires a resolution improvement by an order of magnitude. This is bound to have applications in the molecular biology where such structure determine the functionality. How is this enormous increase in resolution possible? Around 2005 it was realized that by acquisition of time series of blinking or switching fluorophores one can sequentially build up an image, emitter by emitter. Eventually the localization uncertainty is limited by the number of recorded photons. The throughput increases if we can localize emitters whose point spread functions severely overlap. To this end we develop algorithms to improve the fitting procedure and use graphics processors (GPU) to obtain real-time data processing.
In collaboration with the University of New Mexico. Contact Bernd Rieger.
