The race to inner space
by Joyce Peterson
“Can I meet you tomorrow instead?” Joerg Bewersdorf is in a hurry, and not just the usual scientist’s write-this-grant-application- so-I-can-hire-that-postdoc kind of hurry, or finish-this-paper-today-because-I-have-a- conference-tomorrow kind of hurry. Dr. Bewersdorf is in a new kind of space race: competing with other top research institutions to see the smallest structures within a living cell.
Dr. Bewersdorf looks like a college undergrad, but is in fact a 36-year-old research scientist who joined The Jackson Laboratory’s Center for Molecular Biophysics (CMB) in 2005. He works with the Laboratory’s 4Pi confocal laser scanning microscope, the only instrument of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. Using opposing lasers, the 4Pi is capable of imaging the contents of a cell nucleus in three dimensions, at the unprecedented resolution of 100 nanometers. (For comparison, the paper this article is printed on is at least 100,000 nanometers thick.)
Like NASA scientists watching new space telescope images appear on their computer screens, Dr. Bewersdorf and his colleagues were the first people on earth to see some awe-inspiring natural structures. Branch-like Purkinje cells from the cerebellum part of the brain covered with unexpected doorknob-shaped protuberances. Chromosomes caught in the act of reproducing themselves in the cell nucleus.
But 100 nanometers’ resolution is not fine enough for Dr. Bewersdorf and the rest of the CMB team. They’re now working on a new-generation instrument, code-named “Biplane” as a pun on the microscope’s scanning action along two planes, not just two axes like the 4Pi. “The ultimate goal,” he says, “is to image proteins.” That’s right: to look directly at molecules.
