Fixing the Machinery

When you zoom in with your camera, even slight movement of your subject can ruin the photo. That's why for super high resolution microscopy – which is about as zoomed-in as imaginable – researchers fix their subjects in place, freezing cells at a moment in time. But the process of fixing biological samples can distort the delicate structures, causing swelling, collapsing, or breaking of the fine cellular machinery. So researchers work to perfect the technique for halting key structures in samples, such as microtubules (in pink, fibres acting as scaffolding and internal railway tracks), actin filaments (cyan, which maintain a cell’s shape and help it move), mitochondria (in yellow, the tiny power stations of the cell), and DNA (white, packed in chromosomes), pictured in a type of mouse breast cancer cell long-used in research, preserved just as it begins to divide by a team working to perfect a universal, reliable approach.

Image created using super resolution structured illumination microscopy (SIM) at the Micron Bioimaging Facility at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford

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 Leopold Czermak (University of Edinburgh), Madeleine Trussell (University of Oxford) & River Wang (University College London)
• Image copyright held by Leopold Czermak, Madeleine Trussell & River Wang