2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for super-res microscopy!

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

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences <http://www.nobelprize.org/redirect/links_out/prizeawarder.php?from=/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2014/press.html&object=kva&to=http://www.kva.se/en/> 

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.