New Microscope Reveals Ultrastructure of Cells 58
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time, there is no need to chemically fix, stain or cut cells in order to study them. Instead, whole living cells are fast-frozen and studied in their natural environment. The new method delivers an immediate 3-D image, thereby closing a gap between conventional microscopic techniques. The new microscope delivers a high-resolution 3-D image of the entire cell in one step. This is an advantage over electron microscopy, in which a 3-D image is assembled out of many thin sections. This can take up to weeks for just one cell. Also, the cell need not be labeled with dyes, unlike in fluorescence microscopy, where only the labeled structures become visible. The new X-ray microscope instead exploits the natural contrast between organic material and water to form an image of all cell structures. Dr. Gerd Schneider and his microscopy team at the Institute for Soft Matter and Functional Materials have published their development in Nature Methods (abstract)."
Lemme guess.. the article has no pictures (Score:5, Informative)
(checks article)
yep.
figures (Score:1, Informative)
Figures:
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nmeth.1533_ft.html
Re:I never thought I'd say this here (Score:1, Informative)
No, the TFA is under abstract; also no pictures but:
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Welcome to the wonderful world of paywalls. No $, no pix.
Group website. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Lemme guess.. the article has no pictures (Score:5, Informative)
there are several pics from the article here:
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nmeth.1533_ft.html
...a little googling, and I found these (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/pubbin/news_seite?nid=13186;sprache=en;typoid=3228
Re:Where's the real article? (Score:3, Informative)
It seems that the images are accessible. Found these via Google:
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nmeth.1533_F2.html [nature.com]
Old technique (Score:5, Informative)
Terrible misleading article. Maybe its the first time the journalist heard about it, but its hardly the first time this has ever been done.
Despite a desperate attempt by the journalist filter to avoid "science-y words" I've figured out the technique they're talking about is xray microtomography. Basically yet another tomography tech (make a 3 d model in a computer out of a crapload of 2 d pix and lots of processing and memory) but applied to little things.
"The first X-ray microtomography system was conceived and built by Jim Elliott in the early 1980s" Back then 50 nm was considered pretty good resolution, and thirty years later these dudes are down to 30 nm. A slight improvement on the past, and it is cool, but its not like they are "the first", like being the first men to step onto the moons surface or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_microtomography [wikipedia.org]
Saying these guys are the first, is kind of like saying I'm the first human being to see the moons of jupiter thru a telescope, with the footnote that I'm defining telescope today as being home made using these exact lenses from Edmund Optics and these specific (empty) toilet paper tubes with these somewhat unique specific optical parameters, and no one has ever used that exact tech. Or I'm the first to have ever driven my car to work, while burning these specific individual hydrocarbon molecules.
Freely available article link (Score:1, Informative)
The article is freely available here [nature.com] or using wget:
wget --referer="http://www.nature.com/regions/germany/" http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nmeth.1533.pdf
Re:Lemme guess.. the article has no pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Old technique (Score:4, Informative)
"using partially coherent object illumination instead of previously used quasi-incoherent illumination"
which led to :
"We obtained three-dimensional reconstructions of mouse adenocarcinoma cells at ~36-nm (Rayleigh) and ~70-nm (Fourier ring correlation) resolution, which allowed us to visualize the double nuclear membrane, nuclear pores, nuclear membrane channels, mitochondrial cristae and lysosomal inclusions."
Re:natural environment? (Score:4, Informative)
Natural environment meaning microenvironment, or rather, with other cells.
A lot of cell biology is done on cells which have been mechanically or chemically separated, or cells grown in a single layer on a dish. That's okay for some studies, but if you want to study, for example, the stem cells of the intenstine, that's not much good. When you dissociate cells, they change shape which makes some of the microscopy you'd want to do on them pointless right off, and many if not most cells will start changing in other ways when you dissociate them. For many cells, being attached to other cells is a sign they're doing what they're supposed to, if they lose contact they'll start to kill themselves. It's a safeguard against metastasis of cancer cells. If you were looking at cells you isolated from the intestine after you'd dissociated them, you wouldn't be studying intestinal stem cells anymore, you'd be studying cells that were starting to commit suicide.
By freezing it and then leaving the tissue intact, you'd be able to study those cells as they are supposed to exist: attached to other cells and not undergoing apoptosis (assuming you did it right). There are ways of freezing tissues to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals. They won't be alive, but they'll make a good snapshot.
Re:Old technique (Score:4, Informative)
But I'm not trying to downplay their achievement in saying that their work is not without precedent. Frankly the media is over-obsessed with novelty. They only want to report on things from a "first of its kind" perspective, but that's fundamentally disconnected from the way science is done. All advancements build on previous work. Truly new and different things are rare--and they typically don't make much of a splash when they are first tried because the initial work is esoteric, crude, and primitive.
What these scientists have done is really amazing. The images are fantastic and this will no doubt add to researchers' toolkit for analyzing materials in fine detail. I really wish that people could appreciate the quality of this work without it having to be exaggerated or its novelty mis-represented.
Re:I never thought I'd say this here (Score:2, Informative)
That'll be a dollar [slashdot.org]... You can keep the points