5 ms·

A new way to see the activity inside a living cell

83 points by elorant 3y ago

stainablesteel 3y ago
i love when they don't show pictures or videos
- evrimoztamur 3y ago
  The paper is publicly available at the first link in the article, which includes various photos of the different fluorescent 'layers' https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01227-8 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01227-8.
  - observationist 3y ago
    That doesn't make up for the fact that an article about a visual subject matter is conspicuously missing images. Show, don't tell. A picture is worth a thousand words. {insert relevant "pictures are important, yo!" quote here} It means the author, Anne Trafton, didn't give enough of a shit to bother with spending an extra couple minutes doing something right - making the information more complete, accessible, or compelling - but instead did whatever bare minimum was required.
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      > It means the author [...] didn't give a shit Woah woah woah that's an extreme take. You don't know why she did what she did. You are pretending that something subjective (what type of media included in this article) is objective evidence that the author doesn't care about doing things the right way. That's quite a leap.
      - observationist 3y ago
        I can see evidence of objectively better crafted articles on the site, so I can assume there are no policies or rules in the way of doing it better. I notice and appreciate when there are images accompanying articles and discussion about visual things. It bugs the hell out of me when the author doesn't bother and the editor just allows it. I might not be psychic and know to 10 degrees of precision exactly what was going on in their heads, but I have met people before. I feel extremely confident in assuming things about people when it comes to them not caring over some other plausible reason for not doing something well, especially when doing something well requires effort. Even if it's just a little bit of effort, like a couple minutes using screen capture and copy and paste tools. If they gave a shit, it would have been done right, and there would be pictures accompanying the article. If the editor had high standards, they wouldn't allow pictureless articles about visual topics. There are no pictures, ergo. They wanted the clicks. There's no compelling reason to think any better of them than to assume they did whatever bare minimum was necessary, as an assignment or something else to be checked off a list. Maybe they'll see the commentary and think "gee, that makes sense to have pictures!" and for the rest of their writing career, they'll be better. Or not. Either way, I feel fine calling it out.
aendruk 3y ago
For another fascinating technique, see STORM in which making subjects twinkle over time allows you to construct an image exceeding the highest zoom of a microscope.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  For another fascinating but mostly useless technique if you mean. Sincerely, someone who wasted a few years trying to get STORM to work and give anything biologically useful.
  - aendruk 3y ago
    Where I recall hearing about it I think the use was detecting when things ended up at synapses.
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      Very little if any actually biologically relevant results were obtained using super resolution methods. Happy to be corrected with high impact citations of original biology.
svnt 3y ago
> current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time Problem statement. > However, MIT researchers have developed an alternative method that allows them to observe up to seven different molecules at a time That seems… vaguely similar to the problem condition. > a typical light microscope can only distinguish two or three of these colors If you are advancing the state of the art, shouldn’t this read “the highest-performing existing techniques”? What are they leaving out? > In 2020, Boyden’s lab developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell. So it’s from five spread around to seven presumably less spread around, but there must be some resolution issue with overlapping blinking proteins. From what I can tell as an outsider it appears to be an active area of research with a number of proposed solutions for increasing the number of molecules or proteins that can be analyzed at once. This one uses strobing proteins which require post-processing by linear de-mixing and seem like they have twice the noise/error/accuracy issue: wavelength, as with any color-based solution, and switching frequency, which is the novel bit. Superficially it is unclear to me whether it is better than a number of other recent similar papers describing increases in number of molecules monitored at once.
nabla9 3y ago
>Edward Boyden I bet Boyden gets Nobel price in medicine in the future. He is behind many breakthroughs in optogenetics. He developed expansion microscopy as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Boyden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Boyden https://synthneuro.org/ https://synthneuro.org/
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Maybe, but not sure how practically useful this new method is. If any other lab published this they'd get nowhere near a journal like Cell.
lolive 3y ago
Not at all real content, but the websites Angstrom Images [1][2] and CellSignal [3][4] propose a nice (fictionous) view of the internals of a living cell. These were, for me, the most striking introduction to life science I was given. [1] https://angstrom3d.com/cst-molecular-landscapes https://angstrom3d.com/cst-molecular-landscapes [2]https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4d8cc54d71a6b9ee4cf114975a4b907c/03bc49b4-0019-437f-8507-af855eccb8b3_rw_1920.jpg?h=c9ffd38fe3d8d19ddf0d4d8c74825a05 https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4d8cc54d71a6b9ee4cf114975a4b907c... [3] https://www.cellsignal.com/pathways/cellular-landscapes https://www.cellsignal.com/pathways/cellular-landscapes [4] https://media.cellsignal.com/www/html/science/landscapes/protein-synthesis/protein-synthesis.html https://media.cellsignal.com/www/html/science/landscapes/pro...

83 points by elorant 3y ago

stainablesteel 3y ago

i love when they don't show pictures or videos

evrimoztamur 3y ago
The paper is publicly available at the first link in the article, which includes various photos of the different fluorescent 'layers' https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01227-8 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01227-8.
- observationist 3y ago
  That doesn't make up for the fact that an article about a visual subject matter is conspicuously missing images. Show, don't tell. A picture is worth a thousand words. {insert relevant "pictures are important, yo!" quote here} It means the author, Anne Trafton, didn't give enough of a shit to bother with spending an extra couple minutes doing something right - making the information more complete, accessible, or compelling - but instead did whatever bare minimum was required.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    > It means the author [...] didn't give a shit Woah woah woah that's an extreme take. You don't know why she did what she did. You are pretending that something subjective (what type of media included in this article) is objective evidence that the author doesn't care about doing things the right way. That's quite a leap.
    - observationist 3y ago
      I can see evidence of objectively better crafted articles on the site, so I can assume there are no policies or rules in the way of doing it better. I notice and appreciate when there are images accompanying articles and discussion about visual things. It bugs the hell out of me when the author doesn't bother and the editor just allows it. I might not be psychic and know to 10 degrees of precision exactly what was going on in their heads, but I have met people before. I feel extremely confident in assuming things about people when it comes to them not caring over some other plausible reason for not doing something well, especially when doing something well requires effort. Even if it's just a little bit of effort, like a couple minutes using screen capture and copy and paste tools. If they gave a shit, it would have been done right, and there would be pictures accompanying the article. If the editor had high standards, they wouldn't allow pictureless articles about visual topics. There are no pictures, ergo. They wanted the clicks. There's no compelling reason to think any better of them than to assume they did whatever bare minimum was necessary, as an assignment or something else to be checked off a list. Maybe they'll see the commentary and think "gee, that makes sense to have pictures!" and for the rest of their writing career, they'll be better. Or not. Either way, I feel fine calling it out.

aendruk 3y ago

For another fascinating technique, see STORM in which making subjects twinkle over time allows you to construct an image exceeding the highest zoom of a microscope.

ramraj07 3y ago
For another fascinating but mostly useless technique if you mean. Sincerely, someone who wasted a few years trying to get STORM to work and give anything biologically useful.
- aendruk 3y ago
  Where I recall hearing about it I think the use was detecting when things ended up at synapses.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    Very little if any actually biologically relevant results were obtained using super resolution methods. Happy to be corrected with high impact citations of original biology.

svnt 3y ago

> current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time Problem statement. > However, MIT researchers have developed an alternative method that allows them to observe up to seven different molecules at a time That seems… vaguely similar to the problem condition. > a typical light microscope can only distinguish two or three of these colors If you are advancing the state of the art, shouldn’t this read “the highest-performing existing techniques”? What are they leaving out? > In 2020, Boyden’s lab developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell. So it’s from five spread around to seven presumably less spread around, but there must be some resolution issue with overlapping blinking proteins. From what I can tell as an outsider it appears to be an active area of research with a number of proposed solutions for increasing the number of molecules or proteins that can be analyzed at once. This one uses strobing proteins which require post-processing by linear de-mixing and seem like they have twice the noise/error/accuracy issue: wavelength, as with any color-based solution, and switching frequency, which is the novel bit. Superficially it is unclear to me whether it is better than a number of other recent similar papers describing increases in number of molecules monitored at once.

nabla9 3y ago

>Edward Boyden I bet Boyden gets Nobel price in medicine in the future. He is behind many breakthroughs in optogenetics. He developed expansion microscopy as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Boyden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Boyden https://synthneuro.org/ https://synthneuro.org/

ramraj07 3y ago
Maybe, but not sure how practically useful this new method is. If any other lab published this they'd get nowhere near a journal like Cell.

lolive 3y ago

Not at all real content, but the websites Angstrom Images [1][2] and CellSignal [3][4] propose a nice (fictionous) view of the internals of a living cell. These were, for me, the most striking introduction to life science I was given. [1] https://angstrom3d.com/cst-molecular-landscapes https://angstrom3d.com/cst-molecular-landscapes [2]https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4d8cc54d71a6b9ee4cf114975a4b907c/03bc49b4-0019-437f-8507-af855eccb8b3_rw_1920.jpg?h=c9ffd38fe3d8d19ddf0d4d8c74825a05 https://cdn.myportfolio.com/4d8cc54d71a6b9ee4cf114975a4b907c... [3] https://www.cellsignal.com/pathways/cellular-landscapes https://www.cellsignal.com/pathways/cellular-landscapes [4] https://media.cellsignal.com/www/html/science/landscapes/protein-synthesis/protein-synthesis.html https://media.cellsignal.com/www/html/science/landscapes/pro...