Accelerated super-resolution imaging with FRET-PAINT

Super-resolution fluorescence microscopy in the current form is hard to be used to image the neural connectivity of thick tissue samples due to problems such as slow imaging speed, severe photobleaching of fluorescent probes, and high background noise. Recently developed DNA-PAINT solved the photobleaching problem, but its imaging speed is extremely low. We report accelerated super-resolution fluorescence microscopy named FRET-PAINT. Compared to conventional DNA-PAINT, the imaging speed of the microscopy increases up to similar to 30-fold. As demonstrations, we show that 25-50 second imaging time is long enough to provide super-resolution reconstruction of microtubules and mitochondria of COS-7 cells.