Seeing more with structured illumination microscopy

Optical microscopy enables minimally invasive imaging of cellular structures and processes with high specificity via fluorescent labeling, but its spatial resolution is fundamentally limited to approximately half the wavelength of light. Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) can improve this limit by a factor of two while keeping all advantages of light microscopy. Most importantly, SIM is compatible with live-cell imaging, as it only requires low illumination intensities and can rapidly acquire large field of views. It can also take advantage of essentially all fluorophores that are available for fluorescence microscopy and it does not require any specialized sample preparation.