Christoph Cremer (born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is a German physicist and emeritus[1] at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, former honorary professor at the University of Mainz[2][3] and was a former group leader at Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany,[4] who has successfully overcome the conventional limit of resolution that applies to light based investigations (the Abbe limit) by a range of different methods (1971/1978 development of the concept of 4Pi-microscopy; 1996 localization microscopy SPDM; 1997 spatially structured illumination SIM (first developed in 1995 by John M. Guerra at Polaroid Corp.)[5]).
This nanoscope has therefore the potential to add substantially to the current revolution in optical imaging which will affect the entire molecular biology, medical and pharmaceutical research.
[11][12] However the publication from 1978 [13] had drawn an improper physical conclusion (i.e. a point-like spot of light) and had completely missed the axial resolution increase as the actual benefit of adding the other side of the solid angle.
This development provided the basis for important experiments in the area of genome structure research (establishing the existence of so-called chromosome territories in living mammalian cells) and led, a few years later (1979/1980) to a successful collaboration with the biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen).
In this collaboration Cremer used his UV laser micro irradiation equipment to elicit cellular changes in the early larval stages of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
During the next decade, the confocal fluorescence microscopy was developed into a technically fully matured state in particular by groups working at the University of Amsterdam and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and their industry partners.
In later years, this technology was adopted widely by biomolecular and biomedical laboratories and remains to this day the gold standard as far as three-dimensional light microscopy with conventional resolution is concerned.
These methods are mainly used for biomedical applications [21] Around 1995, he commenced with the development of a light microscopic process, which achieved a substantially improved size resolution of cellular nanostructures stained with a fluorescent marker.
In addition, this technology is no longer subjected to the speed limitations of the focusing microscopy so that it becomes possible to undertake 3D analyses of whole cells within short observation times (at the moment around a few seconds).
Vertico-SMI is currently the fastest optical 3D nanoscope for the three-dimensional structural analysis of whole cells worldwide [24] As a biological application in the 3D dual color mode the spatial arrangements of Her2/neu and Her3 clusters was achieved.