From All Angles

When you only see one photo from a particular angle, it’s easy to be misled. That’s a limitation of some microscopy techniques. They've developed vastly from the first microscope, but some, like light microscopes that visualise artificially fluorescent molecules, can only reveal some elements at a time, while others, like electron microscopes, make it hard to distinguish what’s what. A new approach combines these two techniques to provide brilliant, three-dimensional views of both individual structures and their place in their environment. In this video key proteins are visualised through a light microscope (green and purple) and electron microscopy images (orange) reveal structural detail of developing brain cells adhering to each other and finding their way. Applying this technique to other structures in the body may help reveal the nanoscale relationships at the centre of disease development, and ultimately highlight potential new avenues for treatment.

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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• Video from work by David P. Hoffman and Gleb Shtengel, and colleagues
• Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA
• Video copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Science, January 2020