A stunning new technology out of UCSF and recently published in Science is producing some of the most amazing 3-D images of living cells.
“We threw the conventional microscope out the window and began again,” says John Sedat, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Instead of focusing a small spot of light onto cells, the new microscope, which has a resolution of about 100 nanometers, illuminates cells with stripes of light called an interference pattern. When a fine cellular structure, such as a single cluster of proteins embedded in a cell nucleus, reflects this light, it changes the pattern slightly. The microscope collects this light; software is used to interpret changes in its pattern and create an image.”
Check out some of the amazing images:
Two adjoining cells prepare for division by condensing their DNA into chromosomes (red). The membranes around the cell nuclei are stained blue. The green filaments are protein structures called microtubules, which divide the cell’s genome into two equal parts and pull each part into the resulting daughter cells.
The new 3-D microscope developed by University of California biophysicists has shown researchers that the nucleus, which contains the lion’s share of the genome, ...