Imaging life in 3D
With the use of 'light sheets', slivers of light illuminate just the part of a living cell that is in focus, and 3D images are made from many of these thin planes stacked up.
The approach could provide a previously unachievable view of living things because the very best imaging methods known so far do their work on cells that are fixed in place and whose cellular machinery has ground to a halt.
"Most of the techniques I've developed look at dead cells," says Eric Betzig, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute physicist who led the research.
"You can get a lot of information looking at fixed, dead cells - high-resolution information - but you'd still like to be able to see dynamics," he said.
Nature Methods says fluorescence microscopy is acquiring new capabilities as methodological developments allow it to break the diffraction limit - a barrier that until recently prevented light microscopy from being used to interrogate details of cellular function beyond the resolving power of conventional light microscopy.
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