Seeing the Unseeable

There’s more to life than meets the eye. That’s partly because our eyes aren’t designed to detect the tiny wonders of the microscopic world. The molecular activity underpinning all life is driven by chemical interactions, rather than visual cues, so researchers keen to get a look have developed a new tool that uses DNA – our genetic code – to help visualise life the way our cells see it. Tiny chunks of DNA are inserted into cells as molecular markers, which then bind to particular parts of the cells’ genetic code. These fragments latch onto other sections, forming molecules that can be collected and decoded to reveal their relative positions, showing how and where interactions happened. Pinpointing this activity allows researchers to locate individual genetic segments (coloured in a cell culture, pictured), which will ultimately help investigate how cells interact, and even identify diseased or dangerous cells, like cancers.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Joshua Weinstein, Broad Institute
• Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cell, June 2019