Ok time for a science blog! YAY!

So in researching reading for the Imaging Life class that I will (YAY) be teaching this spring at the New School (tell your friends) I came across some pretty remarkable videos and images that I wanted to share. These, to me, are clear examples of the way in which biology and biologists can build instruments and take pictures that, beyond helping to divulge the inner secrets of cells and organisms, actually border on plain old art. As a structural biologist, a significant portion of my work involves what is a really fancy type of photography. It just so happens that we're attempting to take pictures of biological molecules on the atomic scale and that we have to use a particle accelerator to do so, but in so many ways the image that comes out is just another picture. It is simply another visual way we can make sense of the world. It's a portrait, just really really really zoomed in.

I'll start with a protein structure, very near and dear to my heart. A cell in your body is somewhere on the order of 20 micrometers, clearly visible using conventional light microscopy. Your average protein is somewhere on the scale of 2-10nm (the protein below is 5nm across). That means that an individual protein is some 10,000 times smaller than the average cell. In actuality, your cells are just packed full of these proteins; the proteins themselves perform all sorts of functions, catalyze chemical reactions, carry cargo from one end of the cell to another, provide structural support. Proteins are responsible for copying your DNA (your genetic material) each time your cells divide. They do all sorts of sweet shit.




This particular protein fold is called a beta-propeller, for obvious reasons. Its function is known but for now unimportant. I just think it looks sweet. The protein itself forms an extended barrel like shape with a hole in the center. If we zoom in, we can see individual atoms! WOW!




Now the cool thing about this is that in some instances individual atoms are crucial to really important things. Lots of drugs, like entire classes of anti-HIV drugs, have been designed to fit perfectly within the molecular structure of the protein they target. Without the picture of the protein, you're lost. So not only are these pictures pretty (thinks I at least) but they can actually be incredibly important when it comes to piecing together some of the most fundamental processes of cellular life.


Also, bacteria make a syringe (below) that injects your cells with proteins that reprogram it so the bacteria can invade! CRAZY!!!











Those pictures are cool and all but not really the point. Within the past few years a few groups throughout the world have been pushing the limits of what is possible to visualize using a microscope. So here we are back on the scale of several micrometers, visualizing whole cells. One technique in particular really blows my mind. Without getting into the details, let me just say that technique allows us to visualize, really for the first time, embryos as they develop for extremely long periods of time. It allows us to track individual cells and their fates. It may ultimately help us understand how we develop from a tiny little sack of a few thousand cells into a functional organism. And it produces some sweet fucking videos.






This is a video of a zebrafish embryo as it develops. Each cell is individually labeled.




This video is pretty sweet too. Because this microscope constantly scans through the sample you end up getting a 3-D representation of each cell at each time point. This means you can reconstruct the view from any angle you want, changing your point of view at will. Here 4 different views of the embryo are shown. It's absolutely remarkable that the cells divide and divide and then, in such a coordinated fashion, move explosively to different poles of the embryo. A lot of these processes are still poorly understood, but these videos make the entire process seem, in a way, magical, and larger than life.

That's all for now from here in science land. Hopefully some day I'll make pictures and or movies like these. I promise as soon as we publish my protein structure I'll post it on here. And like explain what it means and everything. Sweet.