Thaindian News

Washington, March 6 (IANS) Researchers can now peer right into cellular processes and that too in 3D, thanks to an amazing microscope.

The microscopy technique takes images at high speed, so researchers can create dazzling movies about the actual cellular functioning.

The technique is called Bessel beam plane illumination microscopy. The beam sweeps quickly through a sample of cells, allowing scientists to take nearly 200 images per second and build 3D stacks from hundreds of 2D images in one to 10 seconds, reports the journal Nature Methods.

If one is trying to learn the rules of a game, it is better to have a movie of people playing the game than it is to have still photos - and the same is true for cells, says Eric Betzig, group leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus.

He has been inventing and improving microscopes for more than 30 years. Betzig says that many microscopy techniques require that cells be killed and fixed in position for imaging.

There is only so much one can learn from studying dead cells - the equivalent of still photos, he says, according to a Janelia statement.

But live-cell techniques can be problematic because light produced by microscopes can damage the cell over time. Besides cell damage, light causes the fluorescent molecules — of which there are only so many — to wink out over time.

In other words, the longer you study the cell to uncover its properties, the more damage you do to the cell, Betzig says. This problem has now been overcome with the Bessel beam.