title: Heavy water: a simple solution to increasing the brightness of fluorescent proteins in super-resolution imaging.
abstract: Photoactivatable fluorescent proteins (PA-FPs) are widely used in live single-molecule super-resolution imaging but emit substantially fewer photons than organic dyes do. Herein, we show that in heavy water (D2O) instead of H2O, common PA-FPs emit 26-54% more photons, effectively improving the localization precision in super-resolution imaging.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. bo.huang@ucsf.edu.
authors.forename: Wei Qiang
authors.initials: WQ
authors.lastname: Ong
authors.forename: Y Rose
authors.initials: YR
authors.lastname: Citron
authors.forename: Joerg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schnitzbauer
authors.forename: Daichi
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kamiyama
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Huang
mesh_terms: D017666:Deuterium Oxide / Q000737:chemistry*; D005456:Fluorescent Dyes / Q000737:chemistry*; D008164:Luminescent Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D057054:Molecular Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D017785:Photons
chemical_list: D005456:Fluorescent Dyes; D008164:Luminescent Proteins; D017666:Deuterium Oxide