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Cells come into focus

Glowing molecules can be distinguished one at a time.

Molecules, students are often told, are too small to see with a light microscope. But not any more.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on August 11, 2006 06:15 PM |

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Readers might also like to take note of a manuscript published recently by Nature Methods that describes an imaging method very similar to that published by Betzig et al. in Science.

Sub-diffraction-limit imaging by stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM)
Michael J Rust, Mark Bates & Xiaowei Zhuang
Published online: 9 August 2006; | doi:10.1038/nmeth929

The method described by Xiaowei Zhuang and colleagues at Harvard works by actively switching individual fluorophores on and off so that each of their positions can be precisely determined. They demonstrated their method, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), by accurately measuring positions along a labeled strand of DNA and vizualizing the locations of proteins bound to a single DNA plasmid.

Rather than using a fluorescent protein as Betzig et al. did, Rust et al. used DNA molecules and antibodies labeled with a photo-switchable organic fluorophore to validate the method.

Posted by: Daniel Evanko | August 14, 2006 08:20 PM

Wow! It's really an achievment! Congrats to both the teams!

Posted by: Smitha SL | August 15, 2006 06:42 AM

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