Super-resolution microscopy (STED, PALM, STORM)
Microscopía de superresolución (STED, PALM, STORM)
- Date
- 1994-2006 · confidence medium
- Place
- Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
- Credited to
- Stefan Hell, Eric Betzig, William Moerner and Xiaowei Zhuang
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Fluorescence methods that beat Abbe's diffraction limit, to tens of nanometres, by a depletion beam that shrinks the emitting spot or by recording molecules one at a time. Hell, Betzig and Moerner received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
STED was proposed in 1994 (Hell, then in Turku) and demonstrated in 1999 in Heidelberg; PALM and STORM date from 2006. Place and date are conventional, not a single act.
What it led to
- imaging of proteins and organelles in living cells
- neuroscience at synapse scale
- single-molecule microscopy