Using physical chemistry methods to look at biology at the nanoscale, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researcher has invented a new technology to image single molecules with unprecedented spectral and spatial resolution, thus leading to the first "true-color" super-resolution microscope.
Ke Xu, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division, has dubbed his innovation SR-STORM, or spectrally resolved stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy. Because SR-STORM gives full spectral and spatial information for each molecule, the technology opens the door to high-resolution imaging of multiple components and local chemical environments, such as pH variations, inside a cell.
The research was reported in the journal Nature Methods in a paper titled, "Ultrahigh-throughput single-molecule spectroscopy and spectrally resolved super-resolution microscopy," with co-authors Zhengyang Zhang, Samuel Kenny, Margaret Hauser, and Wan Li, all of UC Berkeley. Xu is also an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Chemistry.
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