Microscope Captures 3D Movies of Living Cells 28
Zothecula writes "In some cases, looking at a living cell under a microscope can cause it damage or worse, can kill it. Now, a new kind of microscope has been invented by researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that is able to non-invasively take a three dimensional look inside living cells with stunning results. The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes and could help biologists to achieve their goal of understanding the rules that govern molecular processes within a cell."
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Yes, I imagine the microscopes were designed quite intelligently.
I have an idea ... (Score:3)
Stop creating explanations for the existence of life and the universe without evidence and then trying to make the available evidence fit into your explanation. That is a sure-fire way to end up with a faulty scientific process and a biased opinion to boot.
Sincerely, an agnostic.
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D-
See me after class.
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You must not think very highly of your "Intelligent Designer" if you think it went to so much effort to hide it's existence, but then slipped up and put proof of itself in an infinite number of cells.
Narrow minds prevail (Score:2)
So much for the free exchange of ideas. Rating my post "troll" is proof of someone's unwillingness to keep an open mind. It was not a "troll" post. It is what I believe will happen, and I still believe that it will. That is not being a troll.
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What, you mean they've removed AC? Some might argue that's an improvement. :-P
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Living cells? (Score:3)
Not much at Gizmodo (Score:4, Informative)
While researchers have been able to use monoclonal antibodies to tag internal bits of cells, you either got fairly poor spatial resolution of living cells because you were imaging the entire cell depth or you got excellent spatial resolution of dead, fixed cells with the obvious issues of stopping a dynamic process. This method, if they can work it out a bit better (resolution doesn't seem to be all that good yet) would combine the advantages of tagging cells at high resolution but using living cells.
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Jesus, are you wrong.
This technology has been available and in use for at least fifteen years. Jason Swedlow's dissertation, in 1994, was to capture the cell cycle of a set of cells undergoing mitosis in a widefield microscope. He got is dissertation from Agard and Sedat, who pioneered the field of 3D live cell microscopy. There are numerous companies that sell widefield microscopes with very good imaging resolution, to the point that the diffraction limit of the lens is the limitation, not the resolutio
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While researchers have been able to use monoclonal antibodies to tag internal bits of cells, you either got fairly poor spatial resolution of living cells because you were imaging the entire cell depth or you got excellent spatial resolution of dead, fixed cells with the obvious issues of stopping a dynamic process.
Antibodies are usually used with fixed (dead) cells. Fluorescent proteins like GFP can be used to visualize live cells just fine. Get a cell to express GFP (pretty easy to do) and you can watch them with any fluorescent microscope at high resolution. You can even fuse the GFP to other proteins to visualize specific structures within the cell. Here [youtube.com] is an example: the red is marking microtubules, the green is marking chromatin during mitosis. Extremely high resolution.
As far as spatial resolution, I t
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You weren't alone, though I didn't have to read the title more than three... ok, maybe four times.
It's called a "Laser" (Score:2)
Dr. Evil: Okay no problem. Here's my second plan. Back in the 60's, I had a weather changing machine that was, in essence, a sophisticated heat beam which we called a "laser."
Re:It's called a "Laser" (Score:5, Funny)
Yurp. And bar-code scanners don't use a "thin sheet" they use a thin beam that scans back and forth rapidly. It just looks like a thin sheet. To virgins.
So where are the movies? (Score:2)
Mirror (Score:3)
http://www.gizmag.com.nyud.net/3d-microscope-movies-living-cells/18138/ [nyud.net] since the server is dying with "Unavailable :(
This website is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.
Unfortunately there were no suitable nodes available to serve this request." error message.