Electrical engineers build a better microscope, and biologists benefit
Electrical engineers at the Jonsson school have developed a microscope that provides biologists with a new window into cellular activity. And they’ve demonstrated the new microscope’s capabilities by discovering a new mechanism of cellular function.
Electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Chao (left) and Prashant Prabhat with Raimund Ober, a professor of electrical engineering who has a joint appointment at UT Southwestern.
Overcoming one of the limitations of traditional microscopy, the researchers’ novel approach produces images of multiple focal planes at once, enabling biologists to see cellular activity in its full three-dimensional complexity instead of being limited to one focal plane at a time.
Prashant Prabhat, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the Jonsson school, is the first author of a paper describing the results of a collaborative effort that included researchers from UT Southwestern and UT Arlington.The paper appeared March 23 in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Despite intensive study, certain intracellular events that are central to cellular function are poorly understood in spatial and dynamic terms, according to the researchers. That’s largely because it’s been impossible to visualize rapidly moving intracellular processes in three dimensions, they noted.
Click the diagram on the left for a larger view.
The engineers’ innovation involves splitting the light coming from a specimen into multiple channels. Then they focus light from each channel onto individual digital cameras. By choosing different camera positions, different focal planes can be imaged simultaneously.
“Our design can be implemented relatively easily by using attachments to an existing standard fluorescence microscope,” they reported in an earlier paper. “We expect that this new imaging modality will allow the investigation of important cellular events that to date could not be studied with a conventional microscope.”
The PNAS paper documents the results of using the new microscope to study what are known as trafficking pathways in living cells. And the results speak for themselves, according to Prashant Prabhat.
“Using this microscope we have discovered a new trafficking pathway for the transport of materials from the interior of a cell to its exterior,” he said.
