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, “is much more highly organized than everybody thought,” says John Sedat, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California , San Francisco . “This is an example of what this technology can deliver on.”
In this image of a nucleus from a mouse-muscle stem cell, three elements are visible. The membrane surrounding the nucleus is stained blue. The nuclear pores, proteins through which RNA, water, and other molecules pass, are stained green. Inside the nucleus, DNA, which has doubled and condensed in preparation for cell division, is stained red.
Shown here is another mouse nucleus, with the cell’s DNA stained red. The DNA is condensing into chromosomes. The envelope surrounding the nucleus, stained green, is beginning to puncture and distort in preparation for cell division.
Read the entire article over at Tech Review.
Popularity: 23% [?]
I was wondering if this microscope is functional only for cells, or it works also for any biological specimen (e.g.: spider’s thread). Do you have any link to this article or something?.Thanks. http://twitter.com/ESS_BILBAO
Excuse me, I didn’t realized that the link was underneath the last photo. Sorry!
The captions talk about staining, but is staining really the process being used? Wouldn’t it be false-coloring in the computer programs that interpret the interference patterns? 100nm is pretty far into the UV, to start with, but it is also mono’chromatic’, if you’ll excuse the term: it’s one wavelength. (it must be to produce the interference patterns they say they are using!) Color infers more than one wavelength (and usually in the visible region), and stains bring out features in ‘normal’ microscopy by making different tissues reflect different (visually-detectable) wavelengths. But here, the tissues are being probed all with one wavelength.
Stains are chemical in nature (reagents) and staining is a chemical phenomenon. So is there a chemical reagent involved in the staining? I’d find that very interesting, but I suspect it isn’t necessary. This computer-aided interfero-holography seems to be quite capable of detecting different structure textures and differentiating on that basis!
Either way, the process is ingenious, and the resulting images are breathtaking!