Meyenburg Prize for Development of Nanoscopy

A special method of light microscopy visualizes biological structures down to DNA

11/17/2011

This Thursday, the Meyenburg Prize 2011, worth 50,000 euros, will be presented at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. The award goes to the physicist Professor Stefan Hell, a specialist in optically high-resolution microscopy at the DKFZ, for the development of a novel method of light microscopy, which allows living cells to be observed down to the nanomolecular level.

As the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg announced Professor Stefan Hell is honored for his outstanding developments with the Meyenburg Prize 2011. With the help of the completely new method of light microscopy developed by Prof. Hell, not only living cells down to the nanomolecular level but also DNA strands can be observed directly. Up to now, it has been possible to observe the highest structures with light microscopy, which were at least 200 nanometers in size, and with the new method it is possible to detect biological structures that are only 20 to 50 nanometers in size.

The limits of light microscopy are broken
So far, the assumption has been that, due to the so-called Abbes law of 1873, light microscopy can only recognize structures and objects in which two points are at least half of the wavelength of the visible light apart. In other words, the natural limit of light microscopy was about 200 nanometers. Bit by bit, however, the Heidelberg researcher Professor Hell has managed to break this barrier. Although smaller structures could be observed earlier with the electron or scanning probe microscopes, but for this purpose, the preparations had to be cut into very thin slices, so that investigations of intact or living cells were impossible. The novel method of light microscopy developed by Professor Hell offers a remedy here.

Watch gaps in the DNA under the microscope
Already in 1990, Professor Hell had developed the 4Pi microscope, which works not just with one light source but with two light sources, so that light from two sides falls on the observed object at the same time, increasing the resolution by four to seven times. The use of laser light for light microscopy has further improved the resolution and so the method of stimulated emission depletion microscopy developed by Prof. Hell offers the possibility to observe biological structures that are up to 2000 times finer than a hair (minimal 20 nanometers). In order to observe such tiny structures with the so-called nanoscopy, the novel method of light microscopy exploits the properties of fluorescent dyes, which are also used in other medical procedures for marking cell structures. With the help of the special light microscopy developed by him, Professor Hell was recently able to visualize DNA strands, and in the future, the expert, now awarded the Meyenburg Prize, hopes to detect repetition or gaps in the DNA under the microscope. In this way, errors in the genome, which can lead to different diseases as well as the development of tumors or cancer, determine the hope of the scientists.

The Meyenburg Prize, awarded to Professor Hell, has been awarded as a scientific prize since 1981 for significant work in the field of cancer research and cancer and funded by the Wilhelm and Maria Meyenburg Foundation. (Fp)

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Image: biophysics.org