3D Vision

You can’t fix a broken car without looking inside to see what’s going on with the engine. Understanding the inner workings of our cells is also a key step in establishing processes underpinning both healthy function and disease. A technique called fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) visualises the movement of molecules within cells, showing the progression of fluorescently labelled molecules across a thin film. Cells in our bodies are not flat slivers, however, so a new approach combines FRAP with other microscopy approaches and simulations to produce 3-dimensional visualisations, such as the T-cells pictured, showing the flow of the structural protein actin along the cell surface. Watching and quantitatively measuring the movement of molecules within cells shows how fundamental processes occur, what changes in this natural dynamic when disease or malfunction sets in, and perhaps even how new drugs or treatments affect the internal goings on.

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 Huw Colin-York and colleagues
• MRC Human Immunology Unit, Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Small Methods, March 2022