Chlorophyll in green plants is thought to reside in the internal membranes or lamellae of chloroplasts (1). These membranes are observable by electron microscopy and can be roughly grouped, on the basis of size and arrangement , into grana lamellae and stroma lamellae which exist as closed, flattened sacs, or thylakoids (2). Al though the chlorophyll molecule is not yet demonstrable by electron...

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded jointly to William E. Moerner, Stefan W. Hell, and Eric Betzig "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy." I discuss the contributions made by this year's awardees and how advances in understanding the behavior of fluorophores and research in light microscopy converged to allow the improved visualization of biological struc...

Two-photon fluorescence microscopy is a powerful method for many applications. Because of the ability of strong attenuation of the background fluorescence, total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM) has been the major technique in the fluorescence imaging and single molecule detections. Recently, we have developed a new type of TIRFM called scanning TIRFM (henceforth abbreviated ...

Deconvolution algorithms have proven very effective in conventional (wide-field) fluorescence microscopy. Their application to confocal microscopy is hampered, in biological experiments, by the presence of important levels of noise in the images and by the lack of a precise knowledge of the point spread function (PSF) of the system. We investigate the application of wavelet-based processing too...

The recently developed technique of two-photon fluorescence microscopy causes much less photodamage than conventional confocal microscopy, expanding the possibilities for imaging living specimens.

Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) has recently emerged as one of the most attractive methods for harvesting triplet states in metal-free organic materials for application in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). A large number of TADF molecules have been reported in the literature with the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of OLEDs by converting non-emissive triplet states into...

We demonstrate a simple and efficient method for producing ultrathin Bessel ('non-diffracting') light sheets of any color using a line-shaped beam and an annulus filter. With this robust and cost-effective technology, we obtained two-color, 3D images of biological samples with lateral/axial resolution of 250 nm/400 nm, and high-speed, 4D volume imaging of 20 μm sized live sample at 1 Hz tempora...