New technique offers higher resolution molecular imaging and analysis

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a new method to conduct spectroscopic nanoscopy, which enables imaging of objects at the nanoscale and could help researchers understand complicated biomolecular interactions and characterize cells and diseases at the single-molecule level. While current spectroscopic single-molecule localization microscopy techniques achieve super-resolution imaging and single-molecule spectroscopy simultaneously, current designs suffer from reduced imaging resolution and spectral precision. When compared to existing techniques using the same number of photons, the researchers found that the new system improved the spatial precision by 42% and spectral precision by 10%.