This has been known since shortly after electron
microscopy came in 1963.
But super-resolution
microscopy comes with a big limitation: it only offers spatial resolution.
Not exact matches
While light - sheet
microscopy is an old idea — scientists at ZEISS
Microscopy and collaborators first
came up with it in 1903 — only in this century has the convergence of fluorescent labels that work to process image volumes combined to make light - sheet mainstream.
Scientists longing to sneak a peek at the molecular machinery of living cells
came one step closer to that goal in March with the creation of lenses that break the limits of current light
microscopy.
The breakthrough
came with a new imaging technique, dual - resonance - frequency - enhanced electrostatic force
microscopy (DREEM), which was developed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chemist and co-author Dorothy Erie, former UNC and NC State postdoctoral researchers Dong Wu and Parminder Kaur, and was featured earlier this year in Molecular Cell.
By parsing the cells with slices of laser light and then correcting for any obstruction with the same AO technique astronomers use to correct blurriness in observations of stars, the scientists have
come up with a
microscopy technique that looks like an artistic rendering.
Relief from this dire situation might
come from unexpected sources, like the technology honoured by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017: cryo - electron
microscopy, or cryo - EM.
Some of the most impressive progress along this path has
come from using noncontact - atomic force
microscopy (NC - AFM), such as measuring individual chemical bonds using a carbon monoxide - functionalized tip.
To
come to a structural understanding of nuclear organisation, we will explore and further improve correlative imaging approaches, combining live cell confocal
microscopy, super-resolution and electron tomography to unravel the structure and mechanisms of NPC assembly and disassembly.
When it
comes to
microscopy, blur is bad.
Support for the X-ray crystallography labs
came naturally, says Sliz, «but the major game change was electron
microscopy.»
The first thing that
comes up in a Google search for «Hoechst» is the family of fluorescent dyes used to stain DNA in cells before
microscopy.