New Studies Enable a Clearer View Inside Cells

Armed with improved imaging techniques and supercomputers, researchers are generating detailed three-dimensional images of cellular structures that anyone can explore.

Andrew Chapman
| 5 min read
computerized image of different layers of a cell shown at great detail

3D rendering of a HeLa cell: plasma membrane (brown), ER (green), mitochondria (orange), nucleus (purple), Golgi (blue), endosomes (cyan), vesicles (red), lysosomes (yellow), lipid droplets (pink), microtubules (dark sticks), and ribosomes (pink haze)

COURTESY OF STEPHAN SAALFELD

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To fully understand how cells work, scientists need to know how their moving parts relate to one another in space and time. However, because of their size and the amount of data involved, visualizing cellular structures in three dimensions has proven difficult. Now, in a trio of new studies, two teams of molecular scientists have aimed to make it easy for everyone to see inside cells. By incorporating painstakingly collected experimental data and partnering with computational biologists, they are bringing 3D visualizations of organelles and chromosomes into sharper focus.

The researchers are also making their 3D data, published in separate studies in early October, freely available for anyone to explore in order to allow researchers around the globe to probe their own questions about how cellular form impacts function. As Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist at Las Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor on one of the papers, puts it: “We’re ...

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Meet the Author

  • Andrew Chapman

    Andrew Chapman

    Andrew is a freelance science writer and graduate student in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. He has a master’s degree in medical genetics from the University of British Columbia but he switched careers when he discovered that writing his thesis was the most enjoyable part of the process. Andrew’s work has appeared in Eos and Science.

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