Nanoscopy in a Living Multicellular Organism Expressing GFP

Abstract

We report superresolution fluorescence microscopy in an intact living organism, namely Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP)-fusion proteins. We also superresolve, by stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, living cultured cells, demonstrating that STED microscopy with GFP can be widely applied. STED with GFP can be performed with both pulsed and continuous-wave lasers spanning a wide wavelength range from at least 556-592 nm. Acquiring subdiffraction resolution images within seconds enables the recording of movies revealing structural dynamics. These results demonstrate that numerous microscopy studies of live samples employing GFP as the marker can be performed at subdiffraction resolution.