The development of dynamic photoactivation localization microscopy (D-PALM).

The aim of this project is to develop dynamic photo-activation localization microscopy (D-PALM). Recently it was demonstrated that the diffraction limit can be bypassed using PALM. PALM is based on the concept that individual emissive, isolated molecules can be localized with nanometer resolution by determining the centre of the emission distribution by fitting. When the positions of all fluorescent molecules are determined, an image can be reconstructed with nanometer resolution by carefully analyzing the recorded fluorescence images. PALM is still a static imaging technique and hence dynamic aspects are hard to study. In this project, a fast CCD camera will be purchased that will allow us to increase the current imaging time resolution from dozen of seconds to video rate. Full frame read-out speeds for the current state of the art CCD cameras is 500 microseconds and in smaller selected areas can be even substantially shorter. For this D-PALM technique, fast switching chromophores are necessary (in the microsecond range) like the recently discovered DNA/silver clusters. This will lead to new diffraction unlimited imaging schemes in which the dynamic aspects of selected topics will be investigated.

Keywords:Microscopy

Disciplines:Inorganic chemistry, Organic chemistry, Theoretical and computational chemistry, Other chemical sciences