Gustafsson, N. et al. Nat. Commun. 7, 12471 (2016).

A range of optical and computational approaches have been developed to enable super-resolution imaging of biological samples; most of these use sophisticated microscopes and/or specialized fluorophores. Gustafsson et al. have developed an algorithmic approach to achieve super-resolution imaging of samples labeled with conventional fluorophores and imaged on standard widefield, confocal or total internal reflection fluorescence microscopes. Their approach, called super-resolution radial fluctuations (SRRF), extracts super-resolution information from a sequence of images without detection and localization of individual fluorophores based on radial symmetry of the imaged fluorophores. They show that their method can achieve 50-nm lateral resolution and can be used to image structures at a wide range of labeling densities. They also demonstrate that the method is valuable for imaging under conditions with low signal-to-noise ratios, as well as for imaging live cells.