Nikon Corporation has signed an agreement with the University of California, San Francisco Office of Technology Management for Structured Illumination Microscopy (Sim) technology.
Under the terms of the agreement, the university will license its technology to Nikon to make N-Sim-enabled microscopes designed to realise resolution higher than can be achieved by conventional optical microscopes.
Optical microscopes are essential for the clear observation of tissues and cells in life science research.
However, if multiple objects such as protein molecules cluster at distances of less than 200nm apart, conventional optical microscopes cannot identify them as single objects, necessitating the use of instrumentation such as electron microscopes.
Nikon's super-resolution fluorescence microscopy technology allows the user to view microstructures and nanostructures of fixed and living cells with molecular-scale resolution.
Nikon's N-Sim microscopy system can produce two times the resolution of conventional optical microscopes by combining Sim technology from UCSF and the Eclipse Ti research inverted microscope with Nikon's CFI Apo Tirf 100x oil objective lens.
Sim takes advantage of moire patterns, which are produced by overlaying one pattern with another.
The sample under the lens is observed while it is illuminated by a special grid pattern of light.
Several different light patterns are applied, and the resulting moire patterns are captured each time by a digital camera.
Computer software algorithms then extract the information in the moire images and translate it into two- and three-dimensional, high-resolution reconstructions.
Effective for live-cell imaging, N-Sim provides a fast imaging capability, with a time resolution of 0.6s/frame.
The Tirf-Sim illumination technique enables total internal reflection fluorescence (Tirf) observation with higher resolution than conventional Tirf microscopes and gives more detailed structural information near the cell membrane.
In addition, another 3D-Sim illumination technique has the capability of optical sectioning of specimens, enabling the visualisation of more detailed cell spatial structures.
Nikon's official name for the commercialised system is Super Resolution Microscope N-Sim and it will be available in May 2010.
