Achievement

COSI-IGERT participants from the University of Colorado Electrical Engineering department, in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University's Chemistry department, analyzed in detail a miss-localization artifact that arises in many superresolution imaging systems and that is caused by the actual orientation of the emitting molecule. They also developed a way to correct this effect by estimating the molecule orientation, reducing the standard deviation in lateral localization of the molecule by a factor of almost 3.5. This impressive improvement, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), can have a great impact on subdiffraction imaging of samples of interest in biomedical interest.

The same group demonstrated quantitative multicolor 3D subdiffraction imaging of the structural arrangement of fluorescent protein fusions in living bacteria. This work was published in NanoLetters.