Nikon N-STORM System

The Nikon N-STORM system is one of the crown jewels among Nikon’s microscope systems. Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) has been a revolutionary technique that achieves super-resolution by temporally separating the registration of individual fluorophores. The most used case is the application of photo-switchable dyes that have a reversible dark state in the appropriate medium. A powerful laser is used to drive almost all of these molecules into a dark state. Periodically a few molecules return to the ground state and due to continuous illumination are excited again and again until driven into dark state again. Recording these spatially separated blinking events and fitting the centroid of the Point Spread Function (PSF) results in a point list. This point list will finally outline the investigated structure and enables the system to reach about tenfold increase in lateral/axial resolution (20-60nm laterally and 50-100nm axially).

The microscope is a TIRF microscope equipped with a series of lenses that focus the laser onto the specimen to further increase the local light intensity 4x or 8X. The microscope is equipped with Nikon’s cutting edge Perfect Focus System that compensates for Z-drift. The unsurpassed stability achieved thanks to the PSF system is prerequisite for STORM imaging. The microscope laser board contains 4 lines: 405,488,561 and 642nm (out of which the 642 and 561 are high power lasers) and a series of high quality filter cubes (HQ Blue, HQ Green, HQ Red, Far-red STORM and Red/Far-Red Dual STORM cube). The microscope is also fitted with a C2 confocal scan head that allows correlative STORM-Confocal imaging. 4x, 10x, 20x Plan Fluor and a 100x TIRF Plan Apo objective is the choice of lenses.