Super‐resolution Fluorescence Imaging for Materials Science

Abstract

While super‐resolution fluorescence imaging has mostly seen applications in the life sciences, an increasing number of laboratories are using these techniques to study materials. This often requires adaptation of the more commonly employed protocols that have been developed for biological systems. Here, the most representative examples of the use of super‐resolution fluorescence microscopy to study a wide range of materials, including polymers, nanofibers, carbon nanostructures, inorganic materials, and other nonbiological systems, are collected. Due to its ability to provide dynamic information, to probe below the outer surface of a material, and to gain information at the molecular level beyond ensemble averaging, super‐resolution fluorescence microscopy has the potential to provide new insights that complement those obtained by well‐established techniques in materials science.

Synthesis of Polyampholyte Janus‐like Microgels by Coacervation of Reactive Precursors in Precipitation Polymerization

“…As super-resolved fluorescence microscopy (SFM) [23] method, dSTORM [24] has been proven to be very suitable for the imaging of microgels. [25] It was also used here to study the morphology of the Janus-like microgels in aqueous solution.…”

Super‐Resolution Microscopy Reveals Shape and Distribution of Dislocations in Single‐Crystal Nanocomposites

“…[18] Our study also further demonstrates the potential of super-resolution microscopy in materials science.W hile principally used to investigate biological specimens,s uperresolution microscopy is attracting increasing attention as am ethod of characterising synthetic materials ranging from polymers,t ocarbon nanostructures,c atalysts and inorganic systems. [28] As prominent examples of its application to inorganic materials,s uper-resolution microscopy has been used to visualise the active sites on catalytic nanoparticles, [29] and to study transport processes in porous materials. [24a,b] A number of recent papers have also used it to characterise perovskite materials,i maging traps, [30] degradation processes [31] and carrier diffusion.…”

Nanoscopic Stoichiometry and Single‐Molecule Counting

“…This has given rise to the new fields of both “optical proteomics” and “optical genomics.” Already, these optical “‐omics” techniques have been employed to quantify amino acid content in short peptides and proteins, perform system‐wide analyses of protein and mRNA copy numbers in Escherichia coli to better understand stochastic gene expression, and probe complex protein networks involved in cancer formation . With the advent of single‐molecule localization microscopy (SMLM), which provides subdiffraction‐limited images extending light microscopy from the microscopic to the nanoscopic, there is the potential to significantly accelerate the optical “‐omics” fields, leading to the development of new platforms for the characterization and identification of proteins and nucleic acids at ultralow concentrations in vitro and in single cells …”