Nov 17 2010
Nikon Instruments Inc., an innovator of advanced optical instruments, announced today that the N-STORM Super Resolution microscope system is now available for purchase and delivery.
The microscope will be on exhibit at the Neuroscience 2010 show in San Diego, Calif., November 13-17, 2010.
In December 2009, Nikon announced it had signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Harvard University granting Nikon the rights to use the Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) technology. Under the terms of the agreement, Nikon manufactured STORM enabled microscopy systems and marketed them with the N-STORM name. The new microscope system incorporates the STORM methodology and is designed to realize resolution higher than ever before achieved by conventional optical microscopes.
"N-STORM will surely be an enabling technology for scientists to enhance our understanding of biology, seeing three dimensional structure, with single protein specificity, at resolution never before possible," said Stephen Ross, General Manager, Products and Marketing, Nikon Instruments Inc.
The STORM technology is a novel advanced form of optical microscopy and provides a solution for the universal desire among life science researchers to observe tissues and cells more clearly. 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. To overcome this limit, a new form of high resolution light microscopy, STORM, was developed in the laboratory of Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Professor of Physics at Harvard University. 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, multicolor fluorescence images of molecular complexes, cells and tissues with a few tens of nanometers resolution has been achieved. This new form of fluorescence microscopy allows molecular interactions in cells and cell-cell interactions in tissues to be imaged at the nanometer scale.
Source: http://www.nikoninstruments.com/