| Description |
Length scales for biomolecules and their complexes that function inside the cell ranges from nanometers to micrometers. However, optical microscopy that serves as the workhorse of many biological laboratories has been limited to a resolving power of ~250 nm due to the diffraction of light. While other methods like electron microscopy provide much better resolution, optical microscopy provides the opportunity to probe living cells, the ability to co-address multiple targets, with more flexibility in sample preparation and simpler instrumentation. Recent advances in optical microscopy have been able to break the diffraction limit using several approaches and provide unprecedented views of cellular architecture. I will introduce the current super-resolution optical methods and focus on my recent work that allows super-resolution imaging of highdensity structures like DNA and protein organization inside the eukaryotic nucleus. Using this technique, we study chromatin architecture of interphase nuclei and the organization of eukaryotic transcription machinery at the global and local scale. |