Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells

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114 pointsohjeez7 comments

This is awesome! The only limiter here is the resolution, I think this is fantastic for cellular level organelles but it doesn't quite get down to the same resolution something like x-ray diffraction does.

There's a huge trade off between resolution and scale that makes it hard to determine things like complex molecular dynamics and how those dynamics influence the broader functions of the cell.

That said, excited for more images like this! More data at that scale is always a good thing for researchers.

Indeed, the amazing images that we've all seen of the coronavirus are from the same technique, cryo-EM tomography, but the overall size of the specimen is also much smaller. There's a limit to how much data can be processed, resulting in a scale-resolution tradeoff.

Now my info might be outdated since it was a few years ago, but I was once told that when you use one of those microscopes, you bring with you a terabyte hard drive for each specimen.

Title in the version I looked at is

Scientists capture how cells trigger inflammation

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