#sted microscopy

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Ring Worm

The nematode worm, C.elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) shares many of our genes, so makes an excellent model for studying parts of us that evolution has kept or ‘conserved’. But there are limits to studying small, crucial elements like these centrioles – structures in the cytoplasm used like north and south poles to help cells orientate themselves. Here researchers use a combination of expansion microscopy, to swell the structures up, and STED microscopy to picture them in high-resolution. They pick apart the tiny components in the overall centriole, like a watchmaker poring over cogs and wheels, although 10 million times smaller. The 'raw' images captured on the left are digitally ‘symmetrized’ using software (right) – revealing the symmetry of a centriole’s different rings in different colours. Now researchers can investigate how each part plays a role in anchoring dividing genetic material during mitosis – in healthy and cancerous cells.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Alexander Woglar and colleagues

Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC), School of Life Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Biology, September 2022

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[theoddcollection]

For anyone whos missed it:

This years nobel prize in chemistry is going to Stefan Hell for his outstanding work in microscopy. You might think this is not such a big deal but look at the difference in the above picture and think what it can do for science.

And for the nerds, here are the facts about the photo:

"Untangling Neurofilaments

Neurofilaments are intermediate filaments in the axon's cytoskeleton, which provide stability and determine the axon's diameter. But with widths of ~10 nm, individual neurofilaments aren't distinguishable with standard confocal microscopy (left). In contrast, STED microscopy reaches resolutions ~25 nm, and thus, can visualize the distribution of neurofilaments inside axons (right).

Image: The OGlcNAcylated epitope of the neurofilament medium subunit was immunolabeled in redifferentiated human neuroblastoma cells and visualized by standard confocal microscopy (left) or with STED microscopy (right) using a homebuilt setup, called a supercontinuum STED microscope, with a white light supercontinuum laser source operated in the visible range of the spectrum."

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