Can we see both small and fast? Investigating the speed limits of Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM)

Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) is a widely used super-resolution microscopy method, capable of imaging at twice the diffraction limit of conventional widefield microscopes. We developed a new method to assess in silico the spatio-temporal resolution limits of SIM, and demonstrated that its capacity to reconstruct super-resolved information is substantially worse than the time required to acquire a full stack of raw frames. We also applied our method to gauge the efficacy of a reconstruction method termed “rolling SIM” which claimed to improve the temporal resolution of SIM, and we showed that this is not the case.