Microscopy preprints – new tools and techniques in imaging

Posted by FocalPlane, on 18 September 2026

Here is a curated selection of the latest preprints on new tools and techniques in imaging. Let us know if we are missing any recent preprints that are on your reading list!

Multiphoton tomographic fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy -TomoFLIM
Liam Collard, Ani Augustine Jose, Fahmida Rahman, Rogelio Garcia-Aguirre, Conor Treacy, Tommy Pallett, Sian Culley, Simon Morris Ameer-Beg, Simon Peter Poland

Figure extracted from Collard, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

A triple fluorescent marker for live imaging of plant cell morphogenesis
Zoé Bomsel, Coralie Goncalves, Aloïse Ducamp, Loris Caillat-Miousse, Bérengère Dalmais, Katia Belcram, Chie Kodera, Claire Lionnet, Camila Goldy, Samantha Moulin, Marie-Cécile Caillaud, David Bouchez, Martine Pastuglia, Magalie Uyttewaal

Figure extracted from Bomsel, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.

Plant-adapted OTO staining improves ultrastructural imaging by transmission electron microscopy
Huiping Yao, Xianhao Jin, Mengsi Sun, Haijing Cheng, Yuke Liao, Yantong Jiang, Huijuan Zhao, Hua Zhou

Single-shot light-field microscopy captures delivery-dependent dye and autofluorescence patterns in Caenorhabditis elegans
Robert Markus, Edward Rea, Nana A. Berfi, Vincenzo Taresco, Chris Hudson, Dominic R.A. White, Veeren M. Chauhan

Concanavalin A as a pan-eukaryotic nuclear envelope marker for expansion microscopy
Baukje Hoogenberg, Felix Mikus, Priyesh Singh Parihar, Iva Verbanac, Diego Beltrame, Marine Olivetta, Thomas A. Richards, Gautam Dey, Omaya Dudin

Figure extracted from Hoogenberg, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

PRISM: A Plasmid-based Reporter for Intracellular Spectral Microscopy
FM Love, Z Baskir, T Allen, S Thomas, H Coyle, N Al-Dam, S Williams, H Maib, N Irigoyen, J Nixon-Abell

Figure extracted from Love, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

Meso2EM: a cross-scale CLEM workflow linking mesoscale functional imaging to targeted electron microscopy
Ikumi Oomoto, Motohide Murate, Jaerin Sohn, Masaru Tamura, Sayuri Hatada, Naomi Egawa, Maya Odagawa, Mitsuo Suga, Yasuo Kawaguchi, Masanori Murayama, Yoshiyuki Kubota

Monomerizing the ultrabright AausFP1 yields mBiyu for advanced imaging across challenging bacterial and mammalian cells
Yu Yan (严雨), Yiqing Shen (沈亦青), Chaoying Peng (彭超颖), Xinyu Wang (汪昕宇), Xiao Lin (林晓), Xiaodong Ye (叶晓东), Jiajia Wang (王佳佳), Sijing Zhang (张丝菁), Hui Wang (汪晖), Xianghui Ou (欧湘辉), Ying Li (李颖), Shishen Du (杜世燊), Quan Chen (陈泉), Xinxing Yang (杨新星)

Extending conventional TIRF microscopy to image single molecules in micromolar analyte backgrounds
R.C. Gentry, K.M. Leon Hernandez, R.L. Gonzalez Jr., C.D. Kinz-Thompson

vFLIM: Machine Learning-enabled Light Sheet Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging
Chad M. Hobson, Owen F. Puls, Jesse S. Aaron, Nicolas Denans, Anja Schmidt, Helen Farrants, Eric R. Schreiter, Teng-Leong Chew

Figure extracted from Hobson, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

WHaloForce enables chemigenetic imaging of molecular tension in living cells and animals
Di Wu, E. Angelo Morales, Joon Lee, Sushil Pangeni, Helen Farrants, Katherine A. Hutchings, Robert J. Barndt, Qi Yu, Xuesong Li, Hari Shroff, Haodi Wu, Alison G. Tebo, Luke D. Lavis, Eric R. Schreiter, Taekjip Ha, Shaohe Wang

Figure extracted from Wu, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

Expression of photoactivatable molecules enables FCS in live cells by controlling fluorescence intensity
Niaz Z. Goodbee, Don Teasley Jr., Christian Pagán Medina, Mary W. Elting, Sharonda J. LeBlanc

NIR-II squeezed light-field microscopy enables high-speed volumetric imaging of deep-tissue dynamics in vivo
Do Young Kim, Zihan Zang, Eric Y. Lin, Ruixuan Zhao, Jing Wang, Tzung K. Hsiai, Ellen M. Sletten, Liang Gao

Spatially patterned, spectral single-molecule microscopy
Joseph S. Beckwith, Brendan Cullinane, Daniel F. Heraghty, Sina Krokowski, Caroline L. Jones, Shengbo Yang, Rebecca C. Gregory, R. Andres Floto, Yuxuan Zhang, Ana Mafalda Santos, Simon J. Davis, Michele Vendruscolo, David Klenerman, Viv Lindo, Praveen Kallamvalliillam Sankaran, Steven F. Lee

Figure extracted from Beckwith, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.

High-speed atomic force–Raman microscopy
Keishi Yang, Feng-Yueh Chan, Akihiko Nakamura, Takayuki Uchihashi, Prabhat Verma, Takayuki Umakoshi

CFM: Confinement Force Microscopy—a dynamic, precise and stable microconfiner for traction force microscopy in spatial confinement
Fatemeh Abbasi, Katharina Rieck, Matthias Brandt, Maja Matis, Eva Kiermaier, Timo Betz

Figure extracted from Abbasi, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

Live-cell PAINT microscopy of protein targets via fluorogenic exchangeable HaloTag ligands
Tong Zhan, Nels C. Gerstner, Julia G. Martin, Jack T. McCann, Marissa C. Lynch, Hsin-Jung Wu, Ke Xu, Evan W. Miller

Seeing in the Dark: Intelligent Fourier Light Field Imaging for Bioluminescence Microscopy
Luis Felipe Morales Curiel, Aaron Kreis, Michael Krieg

Multivalent Adhesive Probe Atomic Force Microscopy (MAPA) for accessing dispersive adhesion of cells and biosurfaces
Maria Gaczynska, Pawel A. Osmulski

Enhanced 2D structured illumination microscopy: super-resolution with optical sectioning and reduced reconstruction artifacts
Sylvia Marie Steinecker, Henning Ortkrass, Jasmin Celine Schürstedt-Seher, Annika Kiel, Angela Kralemann-Köhler, Jan Schulte am Esch, Thomas Huser, Marcel Müller

Figure extracted from Steinecker, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.

Balancing performance and complexity of dual-wedge prism-based spectroscopic single-molecule localization microscopy
Menglin Shi, Wei-Hong Yeo, Cheng Sun, Hao F. Zhang

Figure extracted from Shi, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.

The Tensile Expansion Microscopy (TExM) cell stretcher: an iris expansion device integrated with automated real-time autofocus and tracking to super-resolve cells
Ramita Arampongpun, Tejasvin Shrikanth, Vignesh Venkataramani, Danielle Latham, Marouen Zammali, Vidhi Vakil, Lydia Kisley

Microscope control with a natural language agent
Zach Marin, Amr Abouelezz, Nestor Miguel Castillo Duque de Estrada, Sarah V Schweighofer, Fabian Hauser, Leia T Koestinger, Anvita Manjunath, Nico Stuurman, Florian Schueder, Jonas Ries

A custom two-in-one HIST and line-scanning confocal excitation module
Christian Arthur, Daniel E Milkie, Andrew J Ulmer, Justin P Ellis, Hark Kyun Kim, Feifei Song, Alejandro Chavez, Wesley R Legant

Spatial-filtering nanoscopy for 40-nm label-free Raman imaging
Jiye Li, Benma Lamu, Yuan Feng, Shengwen Wang, Haiyan Zhu, Zhiru Xu, Hulie Zeng

Figure extracted from Li, *et al.* The image is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.

In vivo optical clearing of the mouse brain
Maiko Kume, Ningdong Kang, Alejandro Akrouh, Dae Woo Kim, Joshua T Dearborn, David F Wozniak, Daniel Kerschensteiner, Timothy E. Holy

Multimodal Imaging of the Cellular and Extracellular Microenvironment on the Same Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded Tissue Section
Jade K. Macdonald, Thai Pham, Alan J. Simmons, Harsimran Kaur, Jamie L. Allen, Anna J. Smith, Audra M. Judd, Seung Woo Kang, Madeline E. Colley, Melissa A. Farrow, Ken S. Lau, Jeffrey M. Spraggins

Aberration sensing in fluorescence microscopy using quantum correlations
Shay Elmalem, Shaurya Aarav, Allard K. F. Hübler, Hugo Defienne, Dan Oron

Learning Transferable Self-Supervised Priors for Super-Resolution Reconstruction in Structured Illumination Microscopy
Tong-Tian Weng, Ze-Hao Wang, Qi Wang, Xi-Hua Wang, Xiang-Dong Chen, Fang-Wen Sun

An Affordable Fiducial Marker Strategy for Reliable Autofocus in Long-Term Live Microscopy
Ilyas Djafer-Cherif, Bartlomiej Waclaw