Nikon Corporation has signed an agreement with Harvard University granting Nikon the rights to use the Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (Storm) technology.
Under the terms of the agreement, Nikon will manufacture high-resolution Storm-enabled microscopy systems under the N-Storm brand.
Enabling clearer observation of tissues and cells, Storm technology is an advanced form of optical microscopy - one of the most widely used imaging methods in biomedical research.
The spatial resolution of optical microscopy, limited by the diffraction of light to several hundred nanometres, is larger than typical molecular length scales in cells, leaving many biological investigations beyond the reach of light microscopy.
Storm uses photo-switchable fluorescent probes to temporally separate the otherwise spatially overlapping images of individual molecules, allowing the construction of super-resolution images.
Using this concept, two- and three-dimensional, multicolour fluorescence images of molecular complexes, cells and tissues with a few tens of nanometres resolution have been achieved.
This form of fluorescence microscopy allows molecular interactions in cells and cell-cell interactions in tissues to be imaged at the nanometre scale.
Claimed to provide enhanced resolution that is 10 times or better than that of conventional optical microscopes, N-Storm is based on the Nikon Eclipse Ti research inverted microscope.
The system incorporates CFI60 objectives featuring high numerical apertures developed using optical design, coatings and manufacturing techniques.
The N-Storm instrumentation will be capable of multi-spectral two-dimensional and three-dimensional nanoscopy, with lateral resolution to approximately 20nm and axial resolution to approximately 50nm, extending the role of the optical microscope to near molecular level resolution.
The Storm technology constructs high-resolution fluorescence images (2D and 3D) by overlaying single molecule images from localisation information of fluorophores detected with high accuracy and calculated from multiple exposures.
It generates much more information from detection of single molecule fluorescence emissions and goes one step further, from structural to molecular understanding of the specimen.
The N-Storm Super Resolution microscope system can provide high-resolution two-dimensional image acquisition capability, and with the addition of a 3D optical device switchover built in the microscope, it will also acquire multicolour high-resolution fluorescence images of the same specimen in 3D, without the need for serial section acquisition.
The N-Storm Super Resolution microscope system will be available for delivery in May 2010.
