Intracellular Photoactivation and Quantification Using Fluorescence Microscopy: Chemical Tools and Imaging Approaches

Recent advances in optical microscopy enable the visualization and quantification of biological processes within live cells. To a great extent, these imaging techniques remain limited by the physical properties of the chemical probes that are used as fluorescent tags, detectors and actuators. At the same time, the quantification of concentrations in the intracellular medium is not trivial, but a few approaches that employ optical microscopy have been developed. Herein, we highlight a few examples of how a combination of novel chemical probes and microscopy methods could be used to bring a much-needed quantitative dimension to the field of biological imaging.