Hundred-thousand light holes push nanoscopy to go parallel

The recent work by Chmyrov et al. (Nature Methods 2013) presents a capstone for the current major super-resolution microscopy techniques. In optical super-resolution microscopy, two pathways are commonly taken: targeted illumination modulation, or stochastic single-molecule localization. Incoherent cross-standing microscopy has utilized the concept of structured illumination in generating patterns, to generate effective 100,000 "doughnuts" as with STED; and used the photo-switchable dye to decrease the requirement of modulation intensity. It has combined the key elements of all these major super-resolution techniques.