The NanoChemBioVision project is being co-ordinated at The University of Southampton with an ERC grant lasting until 2020.
It has been developing a generic and simple optic ultra-high resolution technology based on a super-oscillatory modulation of light coupled with wavelength mixing to provide optical information at <100 nm levels. This will be used for new microscopy techniques in vSFG (vibrational sum frequency generation) and CRS (coherent Raman scattering) to attempt to change conventional microscopy. In turn the technology will be used to give new insight into many biochemical phenomena which may also revolutionise the research and biomedical understanding of “unseen biology” as well as the potential to unravel disease, viral infection and allergy mechanisms. They have “imagined” a scenario whereby this could allow the ability to see whether an optical microscope could “see whether a particular virus has infected a biological specimen or not” or “if a single disease causing molecular structure could be detected 20 years before disease manifests itself”.