Zhejiang University and Harbin Institute of Technology Team Lands in Nature: Making Cells Glow on Their Own, Observing Them for 41 Hours Straight
On August 12, a team led by Professor Feng Jiandong of the Department of Chemistry at Zhejiang University, in collaboration with a team led by Professor Zhao Weisong of the School of Instrumentation Science and Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, published research in the top international journal Nature, proposing a new super-resolution imaging method called RIED. Instead of relying on a laser to "illuminate" cells, it lets chemical reactions inside the cells emit their own light for imaging, thereby circumventing the dilemma of conventional fluorescence microscopy in which "the stronger the light, the faster the cells die."
Conventional super-resolution fluorescence microscopes rely on intense lasers to excite fluorescent probes, which brings phototoxicity and photobleaching in its wake; cells usually cannot survive more than a few tens of minutes. The RIED method, by contrast, draws on three light-emitting reaction mechanisms—electrochemiluminescence, chemiluminescence, and bioluminescence—to raise the spatial resolution of imaging to about 100 nanometers. Bioluminescence, in particular, requires no external light source at all and causes almost no harm to live cells.
Leveraging this advantage, the research team carried out continuous super-resolution observation of mitochondria inside live cells for as long as 41 hours, fully capturing the pattern of mitochondrial movement from the cell periphery toward the perinuclear region, and, for the first time at the single-cell level, tracking the entire process by which a mitochondrion transfers from one cell to another. By comparison, the mainstream live-cell super-resolution technique SIM shows severe photobleaching within just 18 minutes of continuous illumination.
This achievement breaks the physiological-duration limitation of super-resolution microscopy—being able to "see clearly" but not to "see for long"—and expands the microscope from a purely optical instrument into a chemically designable imaging platform. It provides a brand-new tool for long-duration exploration of dynamic life processes at the nanoscale, and opens fresh perspectives for research on cell communication, tissue repair, the tumor microenvironment, and more.
(This article was compiled from The Paper's August 2026 report "Zhejiang University x Harbin Institute of Technology Collaboration in Nature: Super-Resolution Chemical Microscopy, Clearly Seeing the 'Nanoscale World' Inside Live Cells Over Long Periods." Original link: https://thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_33779851. Copyright belongs to the original author.)