Blur Removal Tool

You snap a photo at a pivotal life moment, only to later realise your subject has blurred into the background. If only the image could be processed to strip away that interference and leave the important details sharp. That is the promise of a new approach to structured illumination microscopy (SIM), a fast and gentle super-resolution technique for imaging live cells. The approach (bottom left, showing a cell’s microtubule network compared to conventional SIM, top right), works with existing microscopes and mathematically separates the meaningful structural detail of an image from unstructured background blur before removing it, producing a much clearer result. This improved accuracy allows researchers to see cellular structures in greater detail, and in applying the method they revealed new insights into mitochondrial division and showed the intricacies of organelle interactions in a new light.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Wenjie Liu, Meng Zhang, Wenbin Zhu and Shunyu Xie, and colleagues
• Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China and others
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2025