Harvard University has signed a licensing agreement with Nikon Corporation covering the use of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) technology developed in the lab of Xiaowei Zhuang, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Under terms of the agreement, Nikon will manufacture STORM-enabled microscopy systems and market them with the N-STORM name. Optical microscopy is one of the most widely used imaging methods in biomedical research. However, the spatial resolution of optical microscopy — classically limited by the diffraction of light to several hundred nanometers — is substantially larger than typical molecular length scales in cells, leaving many biological investigations beyond the reach of light microscopy.
The STORM technology overcomes these limitations, allowing life science researchers to observe tissues and cells more clearly. STORM uses photo-switchable fluorescent probes to temporally separate the otherwise spatially overlapping images of individual molecules, allowing the construction of two- and three-dimensional, multicolor fluorescence images of molecular complexes, cells, and tissues. The STORM fluorescence microscopy allows molecular interactions in cells and cell-cell interactions in tissues to be imaged at the nanometer scale. The N-STORM Super Resolution microscope system will be available for delivery in May 2010.
Source: Nanowerk