Watching entangled circular DNA in real time with super-resolution

In this talk, we will show how we unraveled the conformational dynamics of entangled ring-shaped polymers in network, which is one of the most well-known problems in polymer physics, using deep imaging based on super-resolution fluorescence imaging, stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy. By using home-written software, we obtained the statistics of each of the hundreds of molecules, mapping out a large statistical distribution. Through inspection we not only found some aspects of the classic understanding of polymers, but some surprising aspects as well.