Eilers, Y. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 6117–6122 (2018).
The recently described MINFLUX nanoscopy method allows for high-resolution monitoring of single molecules with a small fraction of the photons needed for conventional super-resolution microscopy. Although the method was shown to work well for high-resolution imaging of DNA origami structures and for single-particle tracking with high spatiotemporal resolution, its benefits for the investigation of single-particle movements were not fully explored. Eilers et al. now show that MINFLUX can be used to monitor molecular movements of a few nanometers at rates that far surpass the spatiotemporal resolution of conventional approaches. They demonstrated their approach by studying the thermal fluctuation of fluorophore-labeled DNA strands, and achieved ~2-nanometer localization precision with measurements as short as 400 microseconds. These results highlight the power of this approach for studying the dynamics of single molecules.
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Strack, R. Monitoring molecular jumps. Nat Methods 15, 572 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0091-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0091-2