Fluorescence advanced techniques

Single-molecule detection using advanced fluorescence microscopy techniques... 

Progress in instrumentation has considerably improved the sensitivity of fluorescence detection. Advanced fluorescence microscopy techniques allow detection at single molecule level, which opens up new opportunities for the development of fluorescence-based methods or assays in material sciences, biotechnology and in the pharmaceutical industry. 

Finally, in Chapter 11 some advanced techniques are briefly described fluorescence up-conversion, fluorescence microscopy (confocal excitation, two-photon excitation, near-field optics, fluorescence lifetime imaging), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, and single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy. 

Early studies on monolayers of chiral molecules like 2-hydroxyalkanes, amphiphilic amino acids, 2-methylhexacosanoic acid esters, and hydroxy-hexadecanoic acid and its esters have been reviewed. The interesting question about monolayers of chiral molecules is whether the parameters which can be determined and the phase transitions are different for pure enantiomers and racemates. For components of biomembranes like phosphatidylcholines 10 this appears not to be the case," but for synthetic compounds like iV-(a-methylbenzyl-stearamide) 11 specific interactions between the molecules of the enantiomers are observed (Chart 2). ° In recent years, advanced techniques have been developed to probe the order in monolayers at the air-water interface, including surface X-ray diffraction, and microscopic techniques, viz. fluorescence microscopy, and Brewster angle microscopy (BAM). The X-ray diffraction technique has been used to identify homochiral and heterochiral two-dimensional domains in mono-layers of racemic amphiphilic amino acids on subphases containing glycine. Fluorescence microscopy requires the introduction in the monolayer of a small... 

Experimental access to the probabilities P(E E) for energy transfer in large molecules usually involves techniques providing just the first moment of this distribution, i.e. the average energy (A ) transferred in a collision. Such methods include UV absorption, infrared fluorescence and related spectroscopic techniques [11. 28, 71, 72, 73 and 74]. More advanced techniques, such as kinetically controlled selective ionization (KCSI [74]) have also provided information on higher moments of P(E ,E), such as <(A ) ). 

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