What will fluorescence microscopes enable us to see?
Most microscopes ever invented have been ‘optical’. That is they bounce light off an object in order to study it. However, light microscopy suffers from one weakness: limited resolution. Due to the wave nature of light, different waves in a beam of light interfere with each other, i.e. they diffract. Because of this, when a beam of light is focused using a lens, it forms a spot that is about 200 nm wide in the x- and y-directions and 500 nm long in the z-direction, depending on the wavelength of the light and the angle of which the lens can collect light. Since the 1930’s various types of electron microscopes have been invented and while remaining expensive, have come into fairly common usage. The development of the electron microscope, where a beam of electrons is used instead of a beam of light, greatly increased the resolution due to the smaller wavelength of electrons compared to photons. Photons are the particle which light is made of. While electron microscopes revealed an entire
