Mats Gustafsson

Research Interests

This new group works on creating and applying new forms of biological light microscopy with new abilities, especially modes that can reach higher spatial resolution than is normally allowed by the diffraction limit.

Research Summary

The light microscope plays a large and important role in modern cell biology, because of its unique ability to follow specifically labeled molecular players within the 3D interior of living cells. Its main weakness is its modest resolving power, which is fundamentally limited by diffraction. This limit was thought of as an absolute barrier for more than a century, but it has recently been broken, and some of the ways to break it were developed here. Present and future directions include:

o new generations of resolution-enhanced microscopes
o new nonlinear methods to reach extreme (in theory unlimited!) resolution
o adaptive optics to see deep into inhomogeneous samples
o extended-depth-of-field imaging to allow movies of very rapid processes in living cells
o biological applications of all the above

The work is highly interdisciplinary, combining imaging theory, optical and nano-mechanical hardware, instrumentation control, simulation models, and data processing algorithms with molecular biology of fluorescent proteins and various biological applications. Rotation- or thesis-size projects can be defined to suit the interest areas of individual students from a correspondingly wide variety of backgrounds.

Selected Publications

Gustafsson, M. G. L. (2000). Surpassing the Lateral Resolution Limit by a Factor of Two using Structured Illumination Microscopy. J. Microsc. 198: 82-87.

Gustafsson, M. G. L., Agard, D. A., and Sedat, J. W. (1999). I5M: 3D Widefield Light Microscopy with Better Than 100 nm Axial Resolution. J. Microsc. 195: 10-16.