Wannes this is a great question.  There are many fundamental physical and chemical properties that can be interrogated and dissected using single molecule fluorescence with a super resolution imaging capabilities using point spread function fitting or other sub diffraction optical imaging methods. In regards to biological sciences you can track single protein binding events and create real time movies of the kinetic and highly complex diffusion of single molecules in these systems of biological importance. This can provide us with new information often average in ensemble based experimentally modeled systems such as isothermal titration calorimetry and gavimetric based techniques traditional used to investigate these complex systems.  At the single molecule level you can investigate things that relate surface morphologies, ion exchange ligands and salt dependence can vary adsorption processes at a single binding site.  This resolution of information allows for the experimentalist to further uncover mechanistic details at the physical and chemical level to relate to single molecule adsorption behaviors.

Please let me know if this helps answer your question.

Nicholas

Thanks for the reply Nicholas Moringo, 

This is already a very useful reply, but an additional question I ask myself is wether an increase of resolution from super resolution microscopy (10-20 nm) to a resolution of 1-2 nm (new future technique hopefully) will imply drastic changes in experimental data. If it will enable researchers to investigate certain concepts they are unable to verify with the current resolution. Do you maybe know some concepts like this? 

Kind Regards, 

Wannes

Wannes,

One example could be spatial and temporal information regarding the nanoconfinement of target protein molecules in ultrafiltration systems of biological pharmaceuticals. These downstream filtration processes are poorly understood at the mechanistic level chemically and account for over ~50% of drug production in a multi-billion dollar industry.  Single molecule techniques can elucidate rare population of biomolecules often blinded to ensemble based methods. This is one of many examples given the large amounts of biomaterials that either need to tune their inherent resistance or attraction of said biomolecules that dictate system efficacies.

Best

Nicholas  

Article Cover Picture: Protein Interactions with Polymer Coatings an...