Beyond the optical limit –where it does’nt matter how good a microscope is- hide minuscule structures inside the cell. To be able to watch them and understand them better, super resolution techniques have been developed. These make use of the turning on and off of fluorescent molecules to produce images with nanometric scale detail. We work on the implementation of one of these techniques (3B analysis microscopy) in our lab. The following image (false color) shows the quality that can be reached. Frame 1 shows the fluorescent sample as seen on the microscope with a 100x objective. The scale (2000nm) is shown in white and the region of interest analyzed is shown in yellow. Frame 2 is a digital zoom of the region of interest shown in figure 1. Frame 3 shows the reconstruction in super resolution of the region of interest. The difference between the resolution of frames 2 and 3 (which show the same object) is notorious. This reconstruction in super resolution was obtained from 940 frames that were analyzed computationally during 1100 minutes.

Jorge Madrid y Christian Poveda