Amazing stuff! It appears we live in the exciting time of developing new and better microscopes. I just blogged here two days ago about another new microscope technology!
Wow, what opportunities will these latest two improvements to microscopy offer! This is very exciting!
"... The technique — which has recorded jaw-dropping images of individual proteins and never-before-seen structures in cells — offers a level of detail that eclipses even that of multi-million-dollar ‘super-resolution’ microscopes. ...
technique, dubbed ONE microscopy ...
technique ... melds the two approaches to achieve resolutions below 1 nm. That is sharp enough to reveal the shape of individual proteins, which are typically imaged in finer detail using much more expensive structural-biology methods such as cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) or X-ray crystallography. ...
ONE (short for one-step nanoscale-expansion) microscopy uses heat or enzymes to also break the proteins apart, so that individual fragments are stretched in different directions during expansion. ..."
technique, dubbed ONE microscopy ...
technique ... melds the two approaches to achieve resolutions below 1 nm. That is sharp enough to reveal the shape of individual proteins, which are typically imaged in finer detail using much more expensive structural-biology methods such as cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) or X-ray crystallography. ...
ONE (short for one-step nanoscale-expansion) microscopy uses heat or enzymes to also break the proteins apart, so that individual fragments are stretched in different directions during expansion. ..."
From the abstract:
"Fluorescence imaging is one of the most versatile and widely-used tools in biology. Although techniques to overcome the diffraction barrier were introduced more than two decades ago, and the nominal attainable resolution kept improving, , fluorescence microscopy still fails to image the morphology of single proteins or small molecular complexes, either purified or in a cellular context. Here we report a solution to this problem, in the form of one-step nanoscale expansion (ONE) microscopy. We combined the 10-fold axial expansion of the specimen (1000-fold by volume) with a fluorescence fluctuation analysis to enable the description of cultured cells, tissues, viral particles, molecular complexes and single proteins. At the cellular level, using immunostaining, our technology revealed detailed nanoscale arrangements of synaptic proteins, including a quasi-regular organisation of PSD95 clusters. At the single molecule level, upon main chain fluorescent labelling, we could visualise the shape of individual membrane and soluble proteins. Moreover, conformational changes undergone by the ∼17 kDa protein calmodulin upon Ca2+ binding were readily observable. We also imaged and classified molecular aggregates in cerebrospinal fluid samples from Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients, which represents a promising new development towards improved PD diagnosis. ONE microscopy is compatible with conventional microscopes and can be performed with the software we provide here as a free, open-source package. This technology bridges the gap between high-resolution structural biology techniques and light microscopy, and provides a new avenue for discoveries in biology and medicine."
Visualizing proteins by expansion microscopy (open access)
This conventional confocal microscope can achieve nanoscale resolutions using the ONE-microscopy technique
Figure 2. ONE analysis of single molecules
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