You’d assume twice about snapping a selfie if the digital camera flash was vibrant sufficient to burn your pores and skin off. Biologists face an analogous drawback when finding out proteins underneath the microscope, as fashionable imaging strategies can destroy the molecules. Now graphene – the ultra-thin type of carbon – has come to the rescue, and delivered the very first photos of a single protein.
Taking photos of proteins lets us perceive their construction and features. That is essential for treating ailments during which proteins go mistaken, resembling Alzheimer’s. However imaging strategies resembling X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy depend on averaging readings from hundreds of thousands of molecules, giving us a blurry view.
Averaging is required as a result of illuminating molecules with X-rays or high-energy electrons can injury the protein, which means chances are you’ll not get the complete image from a single picture, and likewise as a result of it’s difficult to maintain a single molecule in a single place lengthy sufficient to take its image. Now Jean-Nicolas Longchamp of the College of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues have give you a method to just do that.
They begin by spraying an answer of the proteins on to a sheet of graphene, fixing the proteins in place. Then they place this underneath an electron holographic microscope, which makes use of interference patterns between electrons to provide a picture.
Helpful slide
This sort of instrument depends on low-energy electrons that don’t injury the protein. The snag is that also they are much less in a position to penetrate by means of to the microscope’s detector. That is the place graphene is useful. “In optical microscopy you have a glass slide. For our electron microscopy we had to find a substrate thin enough to have the electrons passing through,” says Longchamp.
The workforce examined their methodology on a spread of protein molecules, all just some nanometres in dimension, such because the haemoglobin present in purple blood cells. The outcomes agreed effectively with molecular fashions derived from X-ray crystallography (see picture beneath), suggesting the photographs are correct.
Now they plan to snap photos of different molecules that may’t be imaged with present strategies, and hope finally to contribute to new medical therapies. “There are some diseases which are related to the wrong structure of certain proteins,” says Longchamp. “In the future, we could image the difference in the structure of a healthy person and a person who has a disease.”
Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1512.08958
(Picture credit score: Jean-Nicolas Longchamp of the College of Zurich, Switzerland)
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“protein under microscope”