Advances in organic fluorescent probes for super-resolution imaging of cellular lipid droplets

Lipid droplets are a kind of spherical organelle in eukaryotic cells and are relevant to many cellu-lar physiological processes. Fluorescence imaging techniques are one of the most powerful tools to visualize and study lipid droplets. However, conventional wide-field microscopy and confocal microscopy can only provide a resolution of about 250 nm due to the limitation of optical diffraction. This resolution is quite insuf-ficient for visualizing the small lipid droplets, especially the nascent ones (size of about 30-60 nm). Emer-ging super-resolution microscopes that can break the diffraction limit (such as stimulated emission depletion microscopy, structured illumination microscopy and photoactivated localization microscopy) have gradually attracted much interest in recent years. To obtain high-resolution fluorescence images of lipid droplets, the advanced fluorescent probes which meet the special requirements of the corresponding super-resolution microscopes are highly essential. This review paper will briefly introduce the working principles of various su-per-resolution microscopes, discuss the special requirements on the photophysical properties of fluorescent probes, and systematically summarize the research progress of super-resolution imaging of lipid droplets by employing these fluorescent probes. Meanwhile, this review will compare the advantages and shortcomings of different super-resolution techniques for lipid droplets imaging, and prospect their future possible trends.