[HN Gopher] A new way to see the activity inside a living cell
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       A new way to see the activity inside a living cell
        
       Author : elorant
       Score  : 79 points
       Date   : 2024-01-03 10:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
        
       | stainablesteel wrote:
       | i love when they don't show pictures or videos
        
         | evrimoztamur wrote:
         | The paper is publicly available at the first link in the
         | article, which includes various photos of the different
         | fluorescent 'layers'
         | https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01227-8.
        
           | observationist wrote:
           | That doesn't make up for the fact that an article about a
           | visual subject matter is conspicuously missing images.
           | 
           | Show, don't tell. A picture is worth a thousand words.
           | {insert relevant "pictures are important, yo!" quote here}
           | 
           | It means the author, Anne Trafton, didn't give enough of a
           | shit to bother with spending an extra couple minutes doing
           | something right - making the information more complete,
           | accessible, or compelling - but instead did whatever bare
           | minimum was required.
        
             | DiggyJohnson wrote:
             | > It means the author [...] didn't give a shit
             | 
             | Woah woah woah that's an extreme take. You don't know why
             | she did what she did. You are pretending that something
             | subjective (what type of media included in this article) is
             | objective evidence that the author doesn't care about doing
             | things the right way. That's quite a leap.
        
       | aendruk wrote:
       | For another fascinating technique, see STORM in which making
       | subjects twinkle over time allows you to construct an image
       | exceeding the highest zoom of a microscope.
        
         | ramraj07 wrote:
         | For another fascinating but mostly useless technique if you
         | mean. Sincerely, someone who wasted a few years trying to get
         | STORM to work and give anything biologically useful.
        
       | svnt wrote:
       | > current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a
       | handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time
       | 
       | Problem statement.
       | 
       | > However, MIT researchers have developed an alternative method
       | that allows them to observe up to seven different molecules at a
       | time
       | 
       | That seems... vaguely similar to the problem condition.
       | 
       | > a typical light microscope can only distinguish two or three of
       | these colors
       | 
       | If you are advancing the state of the art, shouldn't this read
       | "the highest-performing existing techniques"? What are they
       | leaving out?
       | 
       | > In 2020, Boyden's lab developed a way to simultaneously image
       | up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting
       | glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell.
       | 
       | So it's from five spread around to seven presumably less spread
       | around, but there must be some resolution issue with overlapping
       | blinking proteins.
       | 
       | From what I can tell as an outsider it appears to be an active
       | area of research with a number of proposed solutions for
       | increasing the number of molecules or proteins that can be
       | analyzed at once.
       | 
       | This one uses strobing proteins which require post-processing by
       | linear de-mixing and seem like they have twice the
       | noise/error/accuracy issue: wavelength, as with any color-based
       | solution, and switching frequency, which is the novel bit.
       | Superficially it is unclear to me whether it is better than a
       | number of other recent similar papers describing increases in
       | number of molecules monitored at once.
        
       | nabla9 wrote:
       | >Edward Boyden
       | 
       | I bet Boyden gets Nobel price in medicine in the future. He is
       | behind many breakthroughs in optogenetics. He developed expansion
       | microscopy as well.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Boyden
       | 
       | https://synthneuro.org/
        
         | ramraj07 wrote:
         | Maybe, but not sure how practically useful this new method is.
         | If any other lab published this they'd get nowhere near a
         | journal like Cell.
        
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