Martens, K. J. A. et al. Nat. Commun. 10, 3552 (2019).

Single-molecule localization microscopy has become a powerful tool for imaging subcellular structures and for tracking the movements of single molecules within cells. Despite the power of these approaches, a lack of appropriate microscopes still limits widespread use. Martens et al. have developed the miCube, an open-source microscopy framework for doing single-molecule microscopy. The miCube is straightforward for users to build, with readily available and custom-made parts, and is run with freely available software. In this way, the miCube is poised to pave the way for broader uptake of localization microscopy. To demonstrate the performance of the miCube, the authors used their system to study the interactions between dCas9 and DNA in live bacteria using single-particle tracking in the presence or absence of DNA targets, which ultimately resulted in a model that predicts Cas9 cleavage efficiency in bacteria.