Uncovering Motion, Mixtures, and Mislocalization in Complex Environments with Super-Resolution Microscopy

Julie Biteen, University of Michigan

Single-molecule microscopy accesses nanometer-scale information with a benchtop microscope, providing a platform to super-resolve fluorescence emission, position, and dynamics, even in living cells! We are developing new single-molecule methods to answer fundamental, unanswered questions in nanotechnology and microbiology. I will discuss the methods, the analysis approaches1, and two applications of these direct, quantitative, and high-resolution approaches: (i) We are understanding how plasmonic metal nanoantennas reshape fluorescence from nearby dye molecules2, and (ii) We are measuring the protein interactions essential for metabolism in the human gut microbiome. Overall, our results achieve fundamental insight of relevance to human health and nanoscience, and our work offers algorithms that can be further applied to other problems in chemistry, physics, and biology.

References

1J.D. Karslake et al., “SMAUG: Analyzing single-molecule tracks with nonparametric Bayesian statistics,” Methods (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.ymeth.2020.03.008
2S. Chattopadhyay and J.S. Biteen, “Super-resolution characterization of heterogeneous light-matter interactions between single dye molecules and plasmonic nanoparticles,” Analytical Chemistry (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.0c04280

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