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Super-resolution microscopy: breaking the limits

Nature Methods volume 6, pages 15–18 (2009)Cite this article

After a long period of measured development and a recent surge of technical advances driven by physicists, super-resolution fluorescence microscopy emerged in 2008 as a powerful tool for biologists. Kelly Rae Chi reports.

Betzig, Hess, and Lippincott-Schwartz's group worked in the tiny room through that winter, wearing their coats and hats in the unheated room and collecting data. Hess admits he and Betzig, now both at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, didn't know much about biology. For 15 years, they had been thinking about high-resolution imaging. When they learned about photoactivatable green fluorescent protein—which was invented by Lippincott-Schwartz and George Patterson in 2002—they saw it as the missing link in their quest to improve imaging resolution.

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  1. Kelly Rae Chi is a freelance journalist based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA kellyraechi@gmail.com.,

    Kelly Rae Chi

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Chi, K. Super-resolution microscopy: breaking the limits. Nat Methods 6, 15–18 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.f.234

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