Posted 01.07.2010 at 11:35 am
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For scientists studying the smallest components of life, microscopes have always had frustrating limitations. Electron scanning microscopes can see very small object, but not in real time through the dynamic movement of cells. Fluorescent dyes identify microscopic objects, but the brightness of the emitted light greatly reduces the resolution.
The Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscope (STORM) solves both those problems. 100 times more powerful than a regular optical microscope, the STORM filters and adjusts light emitted from fluorescent dyes to produce a clean image of individual molecules, and thus allowing researchers to watch the behavior of proteins in real time.
Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscope: via University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Basically, STORM lets researchers make a video of any of cell's behavior, be it DNA replication or ATM synthesis, in definition so high they can see the individual components of each cellular organelle. While an older light microscope could only identify the center of a protein to within 0.2 inches, the STORM can identify that center to within two billionth of an inch.
Developed by Jennifer Ross, a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the STORM relies on a new fluorescent tagging technique that gives researchers the ability to modulate the light emitted from a tagged molecule. Progressively activated and deactivated adjacent fluorescent proteins provide a contrast that allows the STORM creates composite, mosaic, images with a greater resolution than traditional dye images, and in living, moving cells in real time.
Unfortunately for those biologists though, they're going to have to wait a little while before getting to play with this new toy. The STORM still has two more years of testing with the physics department before those biologists get a crack at it.
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This sounds like an amazing new technology... but I don't think your old light microscopes were working properly. 0.2 inches is a pretty long way away to differentiate between proteins, let alone cells.
Ya needs to be proread, it is 20 billionths of a meter than 200ths of a meter. got the lengths wrong and meassurement units wrong. wow does anyone read this before they post it?
"two billionth of an inch. " enough said..
The obvious errors don't inspire much confidence in the rest of the article. Bet you that the ATM in "ATM synthesis" should be ATP.
Writers make mistakes too, no reason to get all pissy about it. The importance of the article is the content, not a misspelled word.
so if i say we are one au from the moon in an article about atronomy it's cool?
@Cookiees:
You're correct in that some typos, like a common word spelled improperly is no big deal, but things like "...fluorescent proteins provide a contrast that allows the STORM creates composite, mosaic, images..." make the article hard to read. If no editors are available, the writer should at least proof read it for glaring errors like that.
ATM synthesis is very important. Without it, we'd have to go inside a bank during normal business hours every time we needed money.
It's about time that everybody gets to use the metric system. All the confusion between anachronic units of measurement like inches, feet, miles, etc. and metric untis has cost hundreds of millions of dollars (Mars Polar Orbiter, mirror of Hubble telescope). At least in scientific literature let's stick to just one system.
if you have a computer you could help this research group
boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/