Method offers inexpensive imaging at the scale of virus particles with ordinary light microscope

Very recommendable! Amazing stuff! 

The modern light microscope has come a long way since it was invented in the early 17th century. For several decades, many have claimed that further progress was not possible anymore because light microscopes were said to have reached its physical limits! However, multiple innovations have proved them wrong since then!

"Using an ordinary light microscope, MIT engineers have devised a technique for imaging biological samples with accuracy at the scale of 10 nanometers — which should enable them to image viruses and potentially even single biomolecules, the researchers say.
The new technique builds on expansion microscopy, an approach that involves embedding biological samples in a hydrogel and then expanding them before imaging them with a microscope. For the latest version of the technique, the researchers developed a new type of hydrogel that maintains a more uniform configuration, allowing for greater accuracy in imaging tiny structures. ...
Many labs around the world have begun using expansion microscopy since Boyden’s lab first introduced it in 2015. ..."

"... Current ExM [Expansion microscopy] methods permeate specimens with free-radical-chain-growth-polymerized polyacrylate hydrogels, whose network structure limits the local isotropy of expansion as well as the preservation of morphology and shape at the nanoscale. Here we report that ExM is possible using hydrogels that have a more homogeneous network structure, assembled via non-radical terminal linking of tetrahedral monomers. As with earlier forms of ExM, such ‘tetra-gel’-embedded specimens can be iteratively expanded for greater physical magnification. Iterative tetra-gel expansion of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) virions by ~10× in linear dimension results in a median spatial error of 9.2 nm for localizing the viral envelope layer, rather than 14.3 nm from earlier versions of ExM. Moreover, tetra-gel-based expansion better preserves the virion spherical shape. Thus, tetra-gels may support ExM with reduced spatial errors and improved local isotropy, pointing the way towards single-biomolecule accuracy ExM. ..."

Method offers inexpensive imaging at the scale of virus particles | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Using an ordinary light microscope, researchers can now obtain images with unprecedented accuracy.

I believe, this is the referenced research article:

A highly homogeneous polymer composed of tetrahedron-like monomers for high-isotropy expansion microscopy