Rotational Mobility of Single Molecules Affects Localization Accuracy in Super-Resolution Fluorescence Microscopy

The asymmetric nature of single-molecule (SM) dipole emission patterns limits the accuracy of position determination in localization-based super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. The degree of mislocalization depends highly on the rotational mobility of SMs; only for SMs rotating within a cone half angle alpha > 60 degrees can mislocalization errors be bounded to <= 10 nm. Simulations demonstrate how low or high rotational mobility can cause resolution degradation or distortion in super-resolution reconstructions.