Abstract

Recent developments in microscopy have attracted a significant amount of interest in the biological community due to the promise that these new techniques can help to exploit the molecular biology advances for the study of cellular processes.

One of these developments is single molecule microscopy, a technique by which individual single molecules can be imaged rather than the clusters of molecules of prior approaches. Superresolution microscopy exploits single molecule imaging and produces images with a resolution well beyond the classical resolution limits. A critical aspects of these techniques is the accurate localization of single molecules.

Here we will review our results of the use of the Fisher information to characterize the accuracy with which location parameters can be extracted in single molecule microscopy. We will present recent results on the modeling of electron multiplication CCD cameras. These techniques inspired new, unconventional, imaging approaches. Especially for extreme low light imaging scenarios, we show that these new modalities can lead to superresolution images with unprecedented accuracies that are close to the theoretically best possible ones [1].

[1] Chao, J., Ram, S., Ward, E. S., Ober, R. J. Ultrahigh accuracy imaging modality for super-localization microscopy. Nature Methods, 10(4): 335-338, 2013.