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BioQuant congratulates Stefan Hell for the Nobel prize in Chemistry 2014
Stefan Hell has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.
A fundamental law in science – the diffraction limit – states the the resolution can never be better than half the wavelength of light being looked at. According to this conventional light microscopy reaches their resolution limit when two similar objects are closer than 0.2 microns.
With the invention of STED (stimulated Emission Depletion) in the mid 1990’s Stefan Hell circumvented this limitation and opened the door for studying biological processes at the level of sub-cellular structures and eventually at the protein level.
His accomplishments offer completely new perspectives in observing biochemical and cellular processes by nonintrusive optical methods, down to the single molecule level, which is broadly relevant for research in modern life science.
Stefan Hell is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen since 2002. He currently leads the Department of NanoBiophotonic at the MPI in Göttingen and the Division of Optical Nanoscopy at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.
His DKFZ research group has been affiliated with the BioQuant center since 2007 where the scientific infrastructure offers an ideal research environment to further develop and apply STED microcopy for bio medical applications. Stefan Hell has been a member of the Cluster of Excellence Cellular Networks right from the beginning in 2006.
MPI für biophysikalische Chemie