A team of researchers headed by physicist Stephanie Meyer of the Anschutz Medical Campus at the University of Colorado Denver are building a super resolution microscope capable of observing innermost functioning of cells.
The principle investigator of the grant received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Professor of cell and developmental biology at the University, Dr Diego Restrepo worked with the research team to win the funding for the project. The project is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
After reviewing a commercial microscope and realizing that the university was in need of a different design, a decision was made to build the university’s own Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscope. Dr Stephanie Meyer began working on the design in May 2011.
A special donut-shaped laser beam used in the STED microscope achieves extreme clarity and precision when coupled with an excitation beam to enable focusing light on a very small region. In electron microscopes the cells are required to be dead to achieve high resolution. The advantage of the STED microscope is that live cells can be examined at high resolutions, enabling researchers to study tiny workings and intricate details of the cells. This extends to observing the interaction between proteins that leads to finding out the inner functioning of the cells. An additional benefit of the STED is that samples need not be sliced to a very thin size such as for electron microscopes.
The current task is assembling lasers into the body of the microscope. The completion of the microscope may take several months. Once complete, the STED microscope will enable create advancements and opportunities in the field of neuroscience.