Wysocki, L.M. et al. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. advance online publication (26 September 2011).

Photoactivatable xanthene fluorophores are very useful for photoactivated localization microscopy imaging but are challenging to synthesize because of the unique properties of such dyes to exist in both 'open' fluorescent and 'closed' colorless conformations. Wysocki et al. now describe a simple synthetic scheme for making caged xanthene fluorophores, including caged Q-rhodamine, rhodamine 110 and Oregon Green. With these dyes, they demonstrated super-resolution imaging of labeled cellular DNA.