Electrochemically controlled switching of dyes for enhanced super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging (EC-SOFI)

To address these challenges, we introduce electrochemically controlled dye switching for SOFI (EC-SOFI). By applying an oscillating electrochemical potential to a transparent electrode surface, we increase the overall dye switching rate and uniformity. Using Alexa 647 dye as an example, EC-SOFI reduces the average ON time by over 3-fold and switching variance by more than 2-fold compared to conventional photochemical switching, achieving ~60 nm spatial resolution in 6th order EC-SOFI image.

We further demonstrate that EC-SOFI achieves ~130 nm and ~80 nm resolution with 100 and 300 frames, respectively, enabling fast, large-area tile-scan super-resolution imaging. This advancement in EC-SOFI significantly enhances the practical potential of SOFI technique.