Microscope Captures 3D Movies of Living Cells

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."

Comments

Re:When they do...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I imagine the microscopes were designed quite intelligently.

Slashdot = broken

[genjix]

Where's the video? This story is old news from 7 days ago. Slashdot new's quality is declining...

And please fix the double space lining problem; it's annoying. And why hide posts? Everybody's comments below the 'line' get ignored.

Also I can no longer post when not logged in. Old slashdot was better because 'it works'. Don't fix what isn't broken IMO.

Re:Slashdot = broken

[genjix]

btw to anyone who wants to try: post when logged out, then refresh the page. Your post magically disappears.

Re:Slashdot = broken

[gstoddart]

btw to anyone who wants to try: post when logged out, then refresh the page. Your post magically disappears.

What, you mean they've removed AC? Some might argue that's an improvement. :-P

Re:Slashdot = broken

[specialguy92]

I posted a couple days ago while not logged in. The post remained. Must be user error..

Living cells?

[BergZ]

I figured the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, if they are anything like their founder, would be more interested in producing new ways to kill microbes rather than study them!

Re:Living cells?

[Anonymous Coward]

To defeat your enemy, you must first understand him.

Then, when you know his weaknesses, shoot a missile at him.

Not much at Gizmodo

[ColdWetDog]

Just some mindless drivel and a few pics - for a bit more, do a search on "Bessel+beam+plane+illumination+microscopy". Basically, it is a system that uses a narrow collimated light beam that is stepped through a cell to excite photons (it appears that they're using flourescent dyes, not clear if you have to do that), pick up the photons in a detector and reconstruct the image, much like at CT or MRI.

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.

Re:Not much at Gizmodo

[ColdWetDog]

Here's a bit more background for those disinclined to consulting the oracle.

Re:Not much at Gizmodo

[Anonymous Coward]

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 resolution of the camera itself.

Some examples:

3i: www.intelligent-imaging.com
Volocity: http://www.perkinelmer.com/pages/020/cellularimaging/products/volocity.xhtml?Country=USA&Ecommerce=Yes&Dealer=No
API: www.api.com

The summary (and the article itself) is just entirely ignorant of the state of the art.

The point of the article is that they use a new illumination technique to light the cells such that deconvolution isn't necessary-- the entire cell isn't illuminated all at once, just the plane being imaged. Laser scanning can do that, but at a tendency to kill the cells with excess photon flux, and widefield microscopy illuminated everything, requiring deconvolution to be used.

Fixing cells is definitely a microscopy technique, but high resolution scanning of living cells has been what biologists have done for at least a decade.

Re:Not much at Gizmodo

[Beezleboss]

Nitpicking here but, it's not exciting the photons, it's exciting the electrons in the fluorophores, which as they relax emit a photon of a different wavelength. It also says that they are using two photon microscopy which basically requires the energy from two simultaneous photon interactions with the electron to excite it to the required energy level, so yes the fluorescent probes are necessary. This will also retain the problems that the article claims to remove, namely the damaging of the cells and photobleaching (exciting the fluorophore to a point where it is no longer fluorescent) because light of the same wavelength as previous techniques is still needed to excite the fluorophore and so is still being applied to the cell. The only benefit in this regard is that (probably) less light is applied, so the effects will take longer to appear.

Re:Not much at Gizmodo

[interkin3tic]

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 is an example: the red is marking microtubules, the green is marking chromatin during mitosis. Extremely high resolution.

As far as spatial resolution, I think they're talking about -depth-. X and Y spatial resolution is fairly good, and with some of the super resolution microscopy techniques, they're better than we thought they could be. Z resolution with confocals or 2 photon is comparatively poor. The image I saw on the "Bessel+beam+plane+illumination+microscopy" it appeared that depth resolution was just as good as X and Y planes. That is an improvement, but there is quite a bit you can tell from 2d images, and the 3d capabilities aren't so bad these days.

Who invented what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate that when I see the word "Microscope" I think "Microsoft", and even more strongly so on Slashdot. I had to read the title half a dozen times before I read any word *other* than the redmond giant's name.

I need a break.

Re:Who invented what now?

[Yvan256]

You weren't alone, though I didn't have to read the title more than three... ok, maybe four times.

MEH

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll wait for the 2D version.

It's called a "Laser"

[lopaka1998]

>>The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes

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"

[blair1q]

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.

Re:When they do...

[Anonymous Coward]

>... they will find unmistakable evidence of Intelligent Design. Mark my words.

Would that be a message left deliberately or would it be impossible to hide the signs?

If we'd be the designer, and the message was deliberate, what would it say and how?

I have an idea ...

[justinlee37]

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.

Re:When they do...

[Ragzouken]

D-

See me after class.

Re:When they do...

[interkin3tic]

We've had 3d microscopes for a while now, and no evidence so far.

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.

So where are the movies?

[mark-t]

Movie implies a moving picture, not a handful of stills... which is all there was at the page linked in the summary.

Mirror

[antdude]

http://www.gizmag.com.nyud.net/3d-microscope-movies-living-cells/18138/ 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. :(

movies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty amazing. 3D acquisition at high speed and resolution without killing the cells.
http://www.hhmi.org/news/betzig20110304.html
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmeth.1586.html#supplementary-information

Narrow minds prevail

[Announcer]

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.