The University Research Facility in Life Sciences (ULS) is co-organising with the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology (ABCT) and the State Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery a Distinguished Lecture on Super-resolution Fluorescence Microscopy by Prof. Stefan Hell, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2014.
Prof. Hell is credited with having conceived, validated and applied the first viable concept for overcoming Abbe’s diffraction-limited resolution barrier in a light-focusing fluorescence microscope. He pioneered the stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy technique, which subsequently won him a 1/3 share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".
The principle of STED is rather simple but truly optical. Fluorophores at the outer region of the excitation beam are “switched off” by a doughnut-shaped depletion beam. Thus, only signals at the centre of the excitation beam (which are sub-diffraction limit) are detected. STED allows researchers to achieve lateral resolution of 20 nm, which is a 10 times improvement over conventional confocal microscopy.
In this lecture, Prof. Hell will show how he has further improved diffraction-unlimited fluorescence microscopy and developed the novel MINFLUX technique, which has reached the resolution of the size of a single fluorophore molecule (i.e., 1-3 nm) in both fixed and living cells. In addition, Prof. Hell will demonstrate how MINFLUX and the related MINSTED technique would enable characterisation of dynamic processes at the single-protein level, and their potential applications in biomedical science.
Details of the Distinguished Lecture are as follows:
- Date: 15th November, 2024 (Friday)
- Time: 10:00 to 11:15 am (light refreshments will be provided from 9:30 am)
- Venue: V322, Jockey Club Innovation Tower
- Lecture title: Molecular-scale Resolution and Dynamics in Fluorescence Microscopy
Online registration is required for this lecture, and can be done on or before 6th November, 2024. If you have any queries, please contact Dr Michael Yuen of the ULS (Tel.: 3400 8788).
