In the Live Light

In-vitro fluorescence microscopy has long been one of the foundations of life science research. Conjugate your fluorophore to an appropriate ligand, such as an antibody or quantum dot, incubate your tissue sections or cell cultures, shine a light on your sample, and the labeled molecules will shine light right back through your microscope. However, in vitro methods have an obvious drawback: They can't tell you much about biological processes in their natural environment. Increasingly, researchers are applying proven in vitro techniques to live organisms.