"Ultra-bright, Small and Photostable Nanoprobes for Optical Super-Resolution Microscopy Imaging of Nanostructured Soft Materials"

Optical super-resolution microscopy (OSRM) methods provide fluorescence imaging capabilities below the diffraction limit of light. While this set of advanced techniques has seen rapid application to biological questions, their adoption in soft matter has been considerably slower. This is in large part due to the lack of probes able to orthogonally label, and provide super-resolution images of, e.g. nanoscopic structures in the condensed state of soft matter. Here we introduce a novel class of ultrasmall aluminosilicate nanoparticles (aC’ dots) employed in stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) using a single excitation source and without requiring specific aqueous imaging buffers. Tailoring both encapsulated dye and aC’ dot surface chemistry affords straightforward protocols for multicolor OSRM on diffraction-limited and chemically dissimilar features, paving the way for multiplexed OSRM analysis, e.g. of polymer nanostructures in the condensed state.