ISLAMABAD\u00a0\u00a0 –\u00a0 Study co-led by Berkeley Lab and Columbia Engineering could lead to simple, high-resolution bioimaging in real time by overcoming a fundamental property of light. Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to image a cell\u2019s proteins \u2013 the tiny machines that keep cells, and us, running. But to succeed, they need to overcome the diffraction limit, a fundamental property of light that long prevented optical microscopes from bringing into focus anything smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (around 200 nanometers or billionths of a meter) \u2013 far too big to explore many of the inner-workings of a cell.For over a century, scientists have experimented with different approaches \u2013 from intensive calculations to special lasers and microscopes \u2013 to resolve cellular features at ever smaller scales. And in 2014, scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in super-resolution optical microscopy, a groundbreaking technique that bypasses the diffraction limit by harnessing special fluorescent molecules, unusually shaped laser beams, or sophisticated computation to visualize images at the nanoscale.Now, as reported in a cover article in the journal Nature, a team of researchers co-led by the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Columbia University\u2019s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (Columbia Engineering) has developed a new class of crystalline material called avalanching nanoparticles (ANPs) that, when used as a microscopic probe, overcomes the diffraction limit without heavy computation or a super-resolution microscope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ISLAMABAD\u00a0\u00a0 –\u00a0 Study co-led by Berkeley Lab and Columbia Engineering could lead to simple, high-resolution bioimaging in real time by overcoming a fundamental property of light. Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to […]<\/p>\n
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