Pingie: HTTP:: Imaging Individual Biomolecules

HTTP:: Imaging Individual Biomolecules
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Groundbreaking imaging techniques today reveal details of the small-scale world that were never before thought possible. They can image single atoms and structures just nanometers across, but they are notorious for not being able to look inside living molecules. The highly energetic streams of particles they use for their analysis damages living cells, proteins or the DNA to a great extent, making live observations of the processes going on inside cells extremely difficult. Now, a new technique overcomes these hurdles and opens the way for a new class of scientific studies, Technology Review reports. A previous approach to imagine DNA and RNA molecules was to make them into a crystal and then bombard the structure with high-energy electrons, or X-rays. This method ensured that the scientists doing the investigation could see the shape of the molecule inside the crystal, by analyzing the diffraction patterns that were generated when the beams bounced off the crystal. The p!
roblem with this method is that molecules take different shapes, and the diffraction patterns only hinted at the overall form of the clump, in which several molecules were located. In a completely different approach, experts at the University of Zurich, led by scientist Matthias Germann, used a coherent beam of low-energy electrons to create “h...
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http://news.softpedia.com/news/Imaging-Individual-Biomolecules-124031.shtml
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