Chemistry Nobel Prize 2014
Super-Resolved Fluorescence Microscopy. WHAT IS THAT????
Who Were the Winners???
Eric Betzig
Date of Birth: January 13, 1960
Place of Birth: Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Education: Caltech & Cornell
Place of Work: Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA
Field of Study: Physical Chemistry
Interesting Fact: He moved his family out of New Jersey because his 3 year old daughter was developing a Jersey accent.
Stefan W. Hell
Date of Birth: December 23, 1962
Place of Birth: Arad, Romania
Education: University of Heidelberg
Place of Work: Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
Field of Study: Physical Chemistry
Interesting Fact: He wanted to be a scientist based on American science fiction thrillers that were on television when he was a child.
William E. Moerner
Date of Birth: June 24, 1953
Place of Birth: Pleasanton, CA, USA
Education: Washington University
Place of Work: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Field of Study: Physical Chemistry
Interesting Fact: He goes by his initials, W.E.
What Did They Do???
Stefan Hell
- While reading a textbook, Stefan Hell came up with the concept of STED microscopy
- STED stands for stimulated emission depletion
- Stimulated emission depletion is a method, in which laser light excites fluorescent molecules (causing them to become dark and stop glowing) and another light in the center of this laser light causes an individual molecule to glow. In this way, one molecule is glowing and all the molecules around it are dark, and the exact location of the lit-up molecule is known
- The laser moves past each individual molecule, until all the molecules in a cell organelle are known, and an image of the organelle can be captured with very high clarity
Eric Betzig
- Eric Betzig came up with and practiced single-molecule microscopy by putting glowing proteins in the cell membrane of a lysosome
- Then using a very weak light, he was able to cause a fraction of these proteins to glow. Because there was only a very small fraction of proteins that were lit up, they were spread out across the membrane
- The distance between the lit up proteins was more than Abbe’s diffraction unit, so the microscope captured the image precisely.
- This process was continuously repeated on a new subgroup of proteins , and then all the images were superimposed to for a complete and high resolution image of the membrane
William E. Moerner was the first scientist in the world who was able to measure the light absorption of a single molecule
This discovery is what prompted interest in observing individual molecules.
- He also discovered that fluorescent molecules, like those in jellyfish, can turn on and off at will; this idea is the backbone of STED microscopy and single-molecule microscopy.