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Michael Rust urgently needed a name for the new microscopic technique that he and his colleagues had invented while he was a postdoc at Harvard University. “My colleagues were referring to my project in a variety of silly names including ‘SHRIMP-FRAP’ and I really wanted an acronym that would be memorable,” recalls Rust, now a biophysicist at the University of Chicago. Channeling his frustration into good use, he “wrote down every word related to the method,” he says, and rearranged them until he found his favorite: STORM. It stands for STochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy, which makes use of light of different wavelengths to localize individual fluorescent molecule for super-resolution imaging. STORM was published in 2006, and the method has since been cited in nearly 3,900 published papers. (Disclosure: This author used STORM for super-resolution imaging of nanoparticles inside cells as a graduate student at the University ...
