Nikon Instruments Inc., Melville, N.Y., and JEOL, Peabody, Mass., have formed a partnership to research and develop solutions to address correlative light and electron microscopy. Overcoming resolution limits imposed by the diffraction of light has been a major breakthrough in the field of light microscopy, as evidenced by the recent 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to the field of “super-resolution” microscopy. With the development of super-resolution technologies, the two companies have decided to correlate light-microscopy data with electron-microscopy data to further push the limits of resolution.
Despite the breakthrough in resolution limit, light microscopes cannot provide the molecular level information that an electron microscope can. On the other hand, electron microscopes are traditionally restricted to fixed (“non-living”) samples; a limitation that is not present in light microscopy. Light microscopes also have the advantage of enabling selective visualization of structures resulting in an extremely high level of molecular specificity. The Nikon-JEOL alliance was formed to research and develop tools that can correlate light and electron microscopy data, thereby combining the advantages that each technology provides.
