 |
| |
Innovations
Top photo credit: PNNL/MIT
|
New Microscope Gives Scientists the Inside Scoop on Living Cells Jennifer Medlin Abstract
Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, have developed a unique imaging system capable of focusing on a single living cell within an organism. This new technology will be used in what the multidisciplinary team has termed a "cellular observatory" to study the effect of environmental insults to live cells. Traditional analytical methods require the destruction or significant modification of live cells to examine chemical changes within them. But the new system combines nuclear magnetic resonance technology with optical microscopy to allow researchers to track changes in both the shape and chemical content of a live cell as they occur, offering scientists fresh insights into the way cells work and enabling them to study cell phenomena such as apoptosis and the effects of multiple simultaneous chemical exposures in greater depth than ever before.
The full version of this article is available for free in HTML or PDF formats. |
|
|
|
|
