Close to Life

It’s an unfortunate irony that to fully understand living things, it’s often necessary to kill them. Cells are routinely sliced up, pumped full of chemicals and frozen to allow for modern imaging techniques to probe their inner secrets. While giving unprecedented insight, the result of this punishing treatment is to destroy delicate structures within the cell and shroud the many dynamic interactions that make up a living thing. Finding ways to minimise this impact and use a sample that is as close to being alive as possible is essential. A new method using x-rays, which gives stunning 3D views of cells' machinery, such as our natural power stations, called mitochondria (in green), takes a step towards this. The cells, although still dead, can remain close to their natural state under the microscope, raising the possibility of adapting the technique for non-invasive medical imaging.

Written by Jan Piotrowski

Jan Piotrowski

Writer

A recent Imperial College graduate with a Masters in Science Communication, Jan now works as a freelance science communicator. His interests focus on neuroscience, psychology and the environment.

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• Image by Lucy Collinson and colleagues
• London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK
• Copyright Elsevier 2014
• Research published in Ultramicroscopy, August 2014