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Updated: Jan 24, 2026

Visualization of the Immunological Synapse by Dual Color Time-gated Stimulated Emission Depletion STED Nanoscopy
Published on: March 24, 2014
Fight against background noise in stimulated emission depletion nanoscopy
Ye Ma1, Taekjip Ha1,2,3,4
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.
Abstract:
STimulated emission depletion (STED) nanoscopy has been proposed to extend greatly our capability of using light to study a variety of biological problems with nanometer-scale resolution. However, in practice the unwanted background noise degrades the STED image quality and precludes quantitative analysis. Here, we discuss the underlying sources of the background noise in STED images, and review current approaches to alleviate this problem, such as time-gating, anti-Stokes excitation removal, and off-focus incomplete depletion suppression. Progress in correcting uncorrelated background photons in fluorescence correlation spectroscopy combined with STED (STED-FCS) will also be discussed.
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