Fluorescence imaging, analytical method Applications

Fluorescence spectroscopy and its applications to the physical and life sciences have evolved rapidly during the past decade. The increased interest in fluorescence appears to be due to advances in time resolution, methods of data analysis and improved instrumentation. With these advances, it is now practical to perform time-resolved measurements with enough resolution to compare the results with the structural and dynamic features of macromolecules, to probe the structures of proteins, membranes, and nucleic acids, and to acquire two-dimensional microscopic images of chemical or protein distributions in cell cultures. Advances in laser and detector technology have also resulted in renewed interest in fluorescence for clinical and analytical chemistry. 

After the appearance of the first book on fluorescence in 1951 [45], fluorescence spectroscopy became a widely used scientific tool in biochemistry, biophysics, and in material science. In the last few years, however, several new applications based on fluorescence have been developed, promoting fluorescence spectroscopy from a primarily scientific to a more routine method. The phenomena of fluorescence is for example exploited in simple analytical assays in environmental science and clinical chemistry, in cell identification and sorting in flow cytometry, and in imaging of single cells in medicine. The analyte, whose light emission is investi-... 

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