infocus #66 June 2022 Investigating the Use of Fluorescent Nanodiamonds as Imaging Probes for Super-Resolution Microscopy

Microscopy is a scientific technique that allows us to look at the building blocks of life. One of the biggest challenges in the field is that the components of cells intrinsically lack colour, so to be able to visualise different parts of the cell, common practice is to tag them with labels.

This labels the structures we are interested in with a fluorescent tag, which glows in the dark and can be seen easily through the microscope. Using this strategy, we can now see components as small as individual molecules such as proteins and DNA!

However, there is a big stumbling block - these traditional fluorescent dyes are not durable, and during imaging they can degrade and reach a state where they no longer glow in the dark. This means that images must be taken very quickly and in the dark to protect samples from exposure to light and degradation, limiting the quality of the
images obtained.

In this project I explored strategies to use tiny diamonds (nanodiamonds) as alternatives to fluorescent dyes – as diamonds are indestructible, they can glow permanently. I developed nanodiamond tags to label certain parts of the cell, using two different types of super resolution microscopy. I focused on labelling a structure called the nuclear
pore complex, a protein channel that makes up the main gateways to the nucleus (the brain of the cell), and successfully obtained images showing the location of these channels.

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