The MetaMorph Super-Resolution System: Expanding Your Imaging Capabilities

In 1873, Ernst Abbe made the discovery that the resolution of widefield optical microscopy is limited by the diffraction of light. This means that object details spatially smaller than 200 nm are not readily discernible by light microscopy. This poses an obvious limit to the study of many biological problems at the cellular level.

Looking into a world beyond

However, recent advances in imaging have enabled a 10-fold improvement in resolution. Researchers can now see into the world beyond the diffraction limit.

This technique involves capturing the emission from a random limited subset of fluorescent molecules. The process is rapidly repeated thousands of times to form the entire image.

Constructing an image one exposure at a time

Common techniques like photo-activation localization microscopy (‘PALM’), [direct] stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (‘[d]STORM’), and ground state depletion (‘GSD’) all depend on experimental procedures to excite only a fraction of the fluorescent molecules in a sample while the remaining molecules are temporarily turned off to fluoresce- all within a typical camera exposure time of 5–20 ms. Subsequent exposures then turn on a different subset of fluorescent molecules and allow their coordinates to be calculated. The whole sequence of exposures constructs a super-resolution image from the coordinates of individually localized fluorescent molecules.

A system tailored to your needs

The MetaMorph® Super-Resolution System from Molecular Devices® provides a means to control experimental hardware, capture the image sequences, perform localization calculations and display the developing super-resolution image in real time. The MetaMorph Super-Resolution System currently works with many of the commercially available laser launches as well as TIRF optics, and can be enabled on previously installed imaging systems compatible with MetaMorph Software. Molecular Devices has partnered with key hardware suppliers to facilitate a complete super-resolution system tailored to customer needs.

Bypassing the diffraction limit

The MetaMorph Super-Resolution System lets researchers bypass the diffraction limit with patent-pending image processing techniques. Throughout image collection, the System automatically adjusts laser excitation ensuring the number of activated fluorescent probes per frame is both optimal and constant. Users can observe the construction of a high-resolution image as a series of single-molecule images are acquired.