Fluorescence microscopy: Fluorescence microscopy: Nanoisland‐Based Random Activation of Fluorescence for Visualizing Endocytotic Internalization of Adenovirus Small 12/2010

The cover image shows the imaging of adenovirus particles during cellular endocytosis on silver nanoislands. Surface-plasmon-enhanced random activation of locally amplified hot spots is triggered between nanoislands and excites the molecular-fluorescence-tagged adenovirus. The process allows for the resolution of extremely fine events below the diffraction limit as the nanoislands can be made to create hot spots small enough to spatially distinguish molecular events on the nanometer scale. Also, nanoislands can be chemically synthesized over a large area for mass production, so they may be highly important in a practical sense as a commercially viable super-resolution-imaging platform. Dramatically enhanced resolution is experimentally confirmed with fluorescent nanobeads, which is further applied to image the transport of an adenovirus across a live cell membrane. For more information, please read the Communication “Nanoisland-Based Random Activation of Fluorescence for Visualizing Endocytotic Internalization of Adenovirus” by C.-O. Yun, D. Kim, et al., beginning on page 1293.