Researchers in the lab of Sam Peng, the Pfizer Inc. - Gerald Laubach Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have developed a groundbreaking super-resolution imaging technology that allows scientists to visualize molecular structures with sub-angstrom-level localization precision ' three orders of magnitude beyond the nanometer limits of standard fluorescent dyes ' while drastically simplifying the imaging process. Unlike traditional dyes that fade rapidly under illumination and limit data collection, the platform, called U-STORM (Upconversion enabled Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy) utilizes a new class of compositionally engineered upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) that blink spontaneously and indefinitely. For decades, the scientific community widely considered upconverting nanoparticles to be completely photostable and non-blinking. Because localization-based super-resolution...
learn more
