BioStatus is delighted to add its warmest congratulations to the awardees following this press release from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ..
8/10/2014
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014
has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014 to:
Eric Betzig
Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn,
VA, USA
Stefan W. Hell
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, and German
Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
William E. Moerner
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
“for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”
Surpassing the limitations of the light microscope
For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed
limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the
wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates
in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their
ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.
In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways
of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules
create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track
proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases
as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as
these divide into embryos.
It was all but obvious that scientists should ever be able to study
living cells in the tiniest molecular detail. In 1873, the microscopist
Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of
traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2
micrometres. *Eric Betzig*, *Stefan W. Hell* and *William E. Moerner*
are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having bypassed this
limit. Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer
into the nanoworld.
Two separate principles are rewarded. One enables the method /stimulated
emission depletion (STED) microscopy/, developed by Stefan Hell in 2000.
Two laser beams are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to
glow, another cancels out all fluorescence except for that in a
nanometre-sized volume. Scanning over the sample, nanometre for
nanometre, yields an image with a resolution better than Abbe’s
stipulated limit.
Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation
for the second method, /single-molecule microscopy/. The method relies
upon the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on
and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a
few interspersed molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images
yields a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel. In 2006 Eric
Betzig utilized this method for the first time.
Today, nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest
benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis.
