Co-authors Hari Shroff (HHMI Janelia) and Patrick La Rivière collaborate in the MBL Whitman Center.
A new paper in Nature Biotechnology from the Shroff Lab details two practical ways to improve the axial, or z, resolution of 3D structured illumination microscopy, a technique to see inside living cells pioneered by former Janelia Group Leader Mats Gustafsson, who died in 2011.
In 3D-SIM and other fluorescence microscopy techniques, the axial resolution of the image is often blurred. This means researchers can clearly see details in two dimensions, on the x and y planes, but details in the third dimension, on the z plane, are fuzzy. Previous attempts to resolve this issue were difficult to implement.
A project led by Xuesong Li, a postdoc in the Shroff Lab, developed two ways to practically deal with the problem. In one method, a mirror is added to the microscope to create an additional beam of light, changing the interference pattern, and enabling finer, sharper resolution along the z axis.
The second method, which uses deep learning, blurs the sharp x and y axes to look like the blurry z axis and then trains a neural network to reverse these blurry images. The network then uses that information to un-blur the z axis. Read rest of the article here.
