Advances in microscopy

Microscopy is an essential tool to observe cells and catch a picture of cellular behaviour in response to peculiar stimuli. In last number of Nature, five new microscopes have been described. These technologies could allow us to observe details once visible with electron microscope with light, or to use thick sample in electron microscopy instead of light microscopy.
Of course, these instrumentations are really expensive and so sensible that can easily generate artefacts, if mistakes are made. Scientists need a complex training not only for use these microscopes, but also to correctly understand images resulted. For this reason, it becomes important the presence of computational biologists and engineers in research group, to obtain consistent results. But more important, is the collaboration between groups in universities and institutions, in order to buy and maximally use these instrumentations. Rather than shared instrumentation, molecular and cellular biologists need to share their output images in one common database. A repository could make images available for all, and help to better elaborate them. An example of such framework was launched last year by the Journal of Cell Biology: the scientific community’s support will make updated and accessible this important tool.

Reference: Nature vol 459, issue 7247, 4 June 2009
http://jcb-dataviewer.rupress.org/