ABSTRACT
Optical super-resolution microscopy, also termed optical nanoscopy, is currently one of the most important developments in imaging for the life sciences. Initial implementations of stimulated emission depletion had focused on improving the lateral resolution because it offered a directly visible improvement over confocal images with features that remained invisible in the conventional image being clearly visible. Bleaching is a complex spectroscopic process and it is very difficult to give a general rule which imaging conditions are best. Both spatially stochastic and deterministic fluorescence nanoscopy approaches have their specific advantages and disadvantages with respect to photobleaching, setup complexity, imaging speed, or image reconstruction. The fluorescence nanoscopy or super-resolution variants promotes research environments with can easily access a whole range of microscopes and nanoscopes. Discoveries have already been made using superresolution techniques that would not have been possible otherwise, but the full impact of this development is likely to become evident in the years to come.
