Applications of Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy in cellular bio-imaging

Evanescent field based imaging and sensor technologies have been widely used for a long time, but only recently has TIRF been introduced for bio-imaging. This paper will discuss the reasons and give a brief summary of the recent development of TIRF which is also based on evanescent wave excitation, and which is well suited for ultra thin optical sectioning (hundreds of nanometres) at cell-substrate regions with an unusually high signalto- noise ratio and image quality.