Jan/100
Nikon Unveiling the N-STORM High Resolution Microscope System
Nikon Corporation, one of the relevant innovators in advanced optical instruments, has just announced that it has signed a licensing agreement with Harvard University that is granting Nikon the rights to use the Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) technology. Under the terms of that agreement, Nikon will be developing STORM enabled microscopy systems and market them with the N-STORM name.
Also, Nikon Corporation President, Mr. Michio Kariya, and Nikon Instruments Incorporated, are pleased to announce that the N-STORM Super Resolution microscope system will be introduced at the American Society For Cell Biology 49th Annual Meeting. This new microscope system packs the STORM methodology, as well as having a design that enables a higher resolution than was never before achieved by the conventional optical microscopes.
“Nikon is highly anticipating this exciting development in super resolution, providing scientists with exceptional optical instrumentation that allows visualization of nanoscopic cellular structures and molecular activity at unprecedented image resolution,” states Stanley Schwartz, vice president, Nikon Instruments, Inc. “This level of clarity has never been attainable by conventional light microscopy in a commercialized and easy-to-use microscopy system. Nikon is excited about this collaboration and looks forward to progressing together with our design engineers and the Zhuang lab to extend the capabilities and uses of STORM microscopy.”
Now, let’s look a little into that STORM technology, so that we’ll find out this is a novel advanced form of optical microscopy capable of providing a solution for the universal demand among life science researchers to observe tissues and cells more clearly. We all know that optical microscopy is one of the most common used imaging methods in the field of biomedical research nowadays. Nevertheless, the spatial resolution of optical microscopy, always limited by the diffraction of light to several hundred nanometers, is substantially larger than typical molecular length scales in cells, making many biological investigations beyond reach for scientists using light microscopy.
Nikon’s N-STORM Super Resolution microscope system should be available for delivery by May 2010, enabling researchers to take advantage of high resolution fluorescence images, both 2D and 3D, from localization information of fluorophores detected with high accuracy and calculated from multiple exposures.