A team of researchers led by Anna-Karin Gustavsson at Rice University has developed an innovative imaging platform that promises to improve our understanding of cellular structures at the nanoscale. This platform, called soTILT3D for single-objective tilted light sheet with 3D point spread functions (PSFs), offers significant advancements in super-resolution microscopy, enabling fast and precise 3D imaging of multiple cellular structures while the extracellular environment can be controlled and flexibly adjusted. The research was recently published in Nature Communications .
Studying cells at the nanoscale provides insights into the intricate mechanisms that drive cellular behavior, enabling researchers to uncover details that are essential for understanding health and disease. These details can reveal how molecular interactions contribute to cellular functions, which is critical for advancing targeted therapies and understanding disease pathogenesis. While conventional fluorescence microscopy has been useful for studying cellular structures, it has been limited by the diffraction of light, restricting its ability to resolve features smaller than a few hundred nanometers.
Moreover, while single-molecule super-resolution microscopy has provided groundbreaking insights into biological structures at the nanoscale, existing techniques often suffer from high background fluorescence and slow imaging speeds, particularly when dealing with thick samples or complex cell aggregates. Th.