A microscopy technique that images single reaction events in total darkness

Kanoufi, Frédéric; Sojic, Neso

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02098-1

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11 August 2021

A microscopy technique that images single reaction events in total darkness

Single photons emitted from individual electrochemically excited molecules in solution can now be detected. The technique can be used to image cells at nanometre resolution, without using an external light source.

Frédéric Kanoufi ⁰ &
Neso Sojic ¹

Frédéric Kanoufi
1. Frédéric Kanoufi is at the University of Paris, ITODYS, CNRS, 75006 Paris, France.
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Neso Sojic
1. Neso Sojic is at the University of Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, ISM, UMR 5255, 33607 Pessac, France.
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If you want to admire the Milky Way in all its splendour, you should choose a moonless (and possibly romantic) night, away from urban light pollution. Exactly the same principle applies in microscopy, at the other end of the observational size scale: it is much easier to observe faint objects in complete darkness. In a paper in Nature, Dong et al.¹ report their use of this simple but powerful idea in a direct optical method for imaging single photons generated by individual chemical-reaction events in solution. The authors’ method is conceptually different from the fluorescence-based approaches used in conventional single-molecule microscopy, because the excitation process that leads to photon emission is controlled by electrochemistry and chemical reactivity, and does not require irradiation with light. The authors demonstrate that their imaging method can be used for super-resolution microscopy of living cells.

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Nature 596, 194-195 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02098-1

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