The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger Tsien, Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for development and implementation of fluorescent imaging technology. A notable power of fluorescent imaging is its ability to detect extremely small amounts of fluorescent light, allowing for the detailed visualization of the subcellular organization of cells.
However, the resolution of fluorescent microscopy has limits, and limits must be overcome. Here, researchers from Max Planck Institute in Germany report significant improvements in fluorescent microscopy resolution permitting the discrimination of points that are just one nanometer apart, a distance equivalent to the width of several atoms.
