William E Moerner
Stanford University, CA·Biophysics
Most of a cell's working parts, such as enzymes, proteins and DNA, are about 10 nanometers across. Ordinary light microscopes cannot resolve anything smaller than about 200 nanometers, because light spreads out.
- Fields
Biophysics
Chemistry
Biology
- Topics
single-molecule imaging
super-resolution microscopy
single-molecule fluorescence
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Develop a 3D super-resolution microscope that images over a large depth range using pupil-plane phase patterns and a tilted light sheet, for single-molecule imaging and tracking in living cells.
- Build a correlative method that uses cryogenic single-molecule fluorescence positions to label structures in cryo-electron tomography, a 3D electron microscopy technique.
- Analyze physically and mathematically how single-molecule labels interact with light, to maximize the position and motion information obtained from each molecule.
- Apply 3D super-resolution and single-particle tracking to Caulobacter crescentus asymmetric division, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, and chromatin organization, with collaborating biologists.
More about the research
Super-resolution microscopy gets around this limit. One version finds the exact position of single glowing (fluorescent) molecules, switched on a few at a time, reaching 10–40 nanometer precision. A related method, single-particle tracking, follows individual molecules as they move inside cells. The guiding question of this research is how to extract the most information from each single molecule.
Why it matters
Many diseases change the structures and behavior of molecules inside cells. Microscopes that can see and track individual proteins, DNA and RNA at near-molecular precision in living cells could help researchers understand normal and abnormal cell mechanisms in bacteria and in mammalian cells. Linking light and electron microscopy could also strengthen biomedical imaging.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sheng Liu
Clemson University, SC·Biophysics
Build a two-color, high-speed single-particle tracking microscope based on real-time tracking methods like MINFLUX, which can follow two different molecules at once with high spatial and time resolution.
Ke Xu
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Biophysics
Determine how protein charge modulates protein interactions and diffusion inside organelle lumens, using multidimensional super-resolution microscopy that maps diffusivity at nanometer resolution.
Diana Goncalves Schmidt
Kent State University at Kent, OH·Biophysics·Early-career
Optimize the production of DNA origami barcodes, folded DNA nanostructures carrying programmable nanocrystal patterns and fluorescent labels, and characterize them with gel electrophoresis, fluorometry and electron microscopy.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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