Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have recently developed a new and more powerful microscope that allows them to record the activity of live cells and embryos in real time, in 3-D. The invention is said to be far more powerful and accurate when compared to its predecessors.
A technique called the Lattice Light-sheet microscopy is used by this device, which is basically scanning a cell with extremely thin sheets of light as the name suggests. This new invention allows one to obtain high resolution images of the cell while simultaneously decrease the damage done to the cell due to the light.
The man credited with the invention of this scientific marvel, Dr. Eric Betzig, an inventor and a physicist at the Howard Hughes institute said that this microscope might open up many doors leading to many newer applications of microscopy that haven’t been performed or even thought of before.
He cited the example of being able to observe intricacies of cell behavior that might in turn lead to a better understanding of development and reasons for that development of cancer and other problems.
The same man has also been credited with the invention of the super resolved fluorescence microscope, for which he received a Nobel Prize in chemistry, sometime this year. The development of better, more accurate microscope that provide high quality images of cells has more applications than one can imagine.
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