Microscopy articles from across Nature Portfolio

Glycan atlassing is a method for the detection of the spatial organization of cell-surface glycosylation patterns at nanoscale. It shows that such patterns reflect the functional state of the cell, providing direct evidence that the cell-surface glycome encodes biological information via its spatial organization.

A sensational scientific soirée, and reflections on how F. C. L. Wratten advanced photography in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

We observed that a stable self-localized ultrafast pencil beam can emerge inside a standard multimode fiber near the critical power. This beam enables fast, high-resolution, volumetric imaging of intact tissues and real-time tracking of protein uptake in a human blood–brain barrier model.

Whole-brain calcium imaging during pitch-axis vestibular stimulation in larval zebrafish reveals directionally biased neuronal responses and differences from roll-tilt processing, providing a framework to study vertebrate postural control.

Researchers present a low-cost, modular fluorescence microscope built entirely from commercial parts for research and education. Demonstrations include muscle dynamics in Drosophila larvae, stride analysis of tardigrades, and predator-prey dynamics.

The study presents a label-free imaging method that simultaneously captures key molecular signals without scanning, enabling faster visualization of living cells and improving biochemical analysis for cancer diagnosis and treatment assessment.

Fu and colleagues present LUNAR, a self-supervised neural-physics method that reconstructs 3D molecular positions and optical aberrations directly from raw microscopy data, enabling calibration-free super-resolution imaging in complex biological samples.

Glycan atlassing is a method for the detection of the spatial organization of cell-surface glycosylation patterns at nanoscale. It shows that such patterns reflect the functional state of the cell, providing direct evidence that the cell-surface glycome encodes biological information via its spatial organization.

A sensational scientific soirée, and reflections on how F. C. L. Wratten advanced photography in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

We observed that a stable self-localized ultrafast pencil beam can emerge inside a standard multimode fiber near the critical power. This beam enables fast, high-resolution, volumetric imaging of intact tissues and real-time tracking of protein uptake in a human blood–brain barrier model.

Limited-size object optical microscopy enables label-free, far-field super-resolution imaging of arbitrarily shaped particles, with limited size of the field of view as the only required prior knowledge.