Cambridge scientists are part of a resolution revolution. Building powerful instruments that shatter the physical limits of optical microscopy, they are beginning to watch molecular processes as they happen, and in three dimensions.
here has been a revolution in optical microscopy and it's been 350 years in the making. Ever since Robert Hooke published his Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies in 1665, the microscope has opened up the world in miniature. But it has also been limited by the wavelength of light.
Anything smaller than the size of a bacterial cell (around 250 nanometres) appears as a blurred blob through an optical microscope, simply because light waves spread when they are focused on a tiny spot. As a result, resolving two tiny spots that lie close together has been tantalisingly out of reach using an optical microscope. Unfortunately, many biological interactions occur at a spatial scale much smaller than this.
But, thanks to recent breakthroughs, a new era of super-resolution microscopy has begun. The developments earned inventors Eric Betzig and William E Moerner (USA) and Stefan Hell (Germany) the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and are based on clever physical tricks that work around the problem of light diffraction.
To read more, click here.