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Science In Action: Powerful Microscopy

Microscope - Image credit: Carsten Koall Getty Images

23/10/2014

Powerful Microscopy

BBC World Service - Science In Action, Powerful Microscopy

Nobel Laureate-led team develop microscopy methods to film cell activity.

Powerful Microscopy; Spinal Cord Repair; Bluetongue Virus Vaccine; Hopes for Future Space Exploration.

Powerful Microscopy 
A Nobel Laureate-led team have developed new microscopy methods which allow them to film of cell activity, something previously impossible to catch.  Dr Eric Betzig, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry for Super Resolved Fluorescence Microscopy, and his team built on light-sheet microscopy methods to produce a means to look at live cells in minute detail without damaging them.  Now scientists can observe previously ‘invisible’ intricate biological processes, like the development of a fertilised egg or how messages are sent between nerve cells in the brain.  Dr Eric Betzig, from the Janelia Research Campus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, explains why he was determined to improve the work he won the Nobel Prize for. 

Spinal Cord Repair
A paralysed man with a severed spinal cord, Darek Fidyka, can walk again after undergoing pioneering therapy.  A world first carried out by surgeons in Poland along with scientists in London, this treatment saw cells from the nose transplanted into Darek Fidyka’s spine.  The researchers used specialised, smell sensing cells from the nose that have the ability to be continually renewed because they are damaged every time odour-transmitting molecules come into contact with them.  This property made them an ideal candidate for cells to help repair the nerves in the spine which lack this ability to re-grow themselves.  Dr Pawel Tabakow, the lead neurosurgeon at the Wroclaw University Hospital in Poland where the patient was treated, talks to Science in Action about carrying out this treatment for the first time in humans.  Professor John Haycock, Director of the Centre for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering at the University of Sheffield in the UK, comments.  

Bluetongue Virus Vaccine 
Bluetongue virus is a devastating disease spread by biting midges that affects livestock all over the world.  Vaccines do exist against this virus but if a new strain of bluetongue emerges (and there are more than 25 known types of it!), a new vaccine has to be developed and this can be a long process.  Now, scientists show that they can build a vaccine using synthetic biology, a method which leads the way to a better, faster means of producing effective vaccines.   Dr Anthony Wilson, Head of the Vector-Borne Diseases Group at the Pirbright Institute in the UK, tells Science in Action about the problems that exist for current measures to prevent Bluetongue and Professor Massimo Palmarini, director of the Centre for Virus Research, who led the research at the University of Glasgow, explains how this new method works.

Hopes for Future Space Exploration
NASA recently made a big announcement that it is getting back into the astronaut transport business.  They have been sending its crews to the International Space Station but they hope to go much further afield, and eventually to Mars by the 2030s.  Jack Stewart speaks to former astronaut Jeff Hoffman, now Professor of the Aerospace Engineering at MIT in the US, at the BBC’s World Changing Ideas Summit in New York.  He talks about the challenges NASA and other space agencies across the world face for future manned missions to the further reaches of our Solar System and about the vehicles being developed to overcome them.

Microscope - Image credit: Carsten Koall Getty Images

Presenter: Jack Stewart
Producer:  Ania Lichtarowicz

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