These pages represent the research interests of Rainer Heintzmann with research groups at the Institute of Photonics Technology, the Department of Physical Chemisty at the FSU, Jena and the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics, King's College London. The research focuses on developing (often high-resolution) techniques to
measure multidimensional information in small biological objects such
as cells, cellular organelles, molecules or other structures of
interest. Molecules interact in living cells at specific places (e.g. inside organelles) and often at well defined times (e.g. after stimulation with other molecules). Much biological research is now focused onto unravelling these details. Luckily there are a number of physical effects, which can be used to tell things apart, when one or multiple molecules are fluorescing (either by themselves or by having a specific fluorescent molecule (fluorophore) attached to them). For a nice demonstration on different biological objects and their sizes, click here. Recently a number of molecules have been found that can be switched
between different fluorescent states by illumination at separate
wavelengths. The transitions between the states can be driven into
saturation. The arising non-linear dependencies offer the unique
possibility of a theoretically unlimited optical resolution.
Part of our work focuses on an experimental demonstration of high
resolution based on these effects. To this aim we employ an imaging
mode in which the sample is illuminated with a grid of very fine lines.
This technique is called structured illumination (SI).  This is an example comparing stuctured illumiination (left) and standard imaging (right) of muscle myofibrils acquired by Liisa Hirvonen in collaboration with Elisabeth Ehler.Selected Recent Publications
|