SummEr/FAll 2011 - Nazareth College

LIFE | of the mind
Biology Student Research
Reaches New Dimension
by Matthew Temple
“S
eeing is believing” has now taken on new
levels of meaning in the biology department
at Nazareth with a new microscope
that “sees” in 3-D. I’ve been teaching
Nazareth students how to look at cells
through a microscope since 1984. And since
1984, I’ve often had to apologize to them
because we know that cells actually have
three-dimensional shapes—as spheres or cubes
or even blobs—but under the microscope,
those cells are often flattened in order to be
examined. It’s like the difference between
looking at a fully inflated soccer ball and one
that has been deflated into a flat and distorted
caricature of its former self. But at Nazareth,
this is now no longer the case.
Last summer, the biology department
acquired a microscope that can “see” into a
cell in three dimensions and that enables us to
appreciate how cells package vital components
within their spaces. Technically, this is called an
optical-sectioning microscope, because it takes
finely focused pictures of up to 50 slices of a
cell from top to bottom. Those slices are then
compiled by a computer into a three-dimensional
rendering of that cell. Furthermore, different
components within a cell are literally lit
up by fluorescent dyes, which can make DNA
(the genetic material) glow a brilliant blue, fat
droplets (cells have to deal with fat, too) a vivid
green, and structural fibers a deep red.
Look at the picture produced by Kelly Noble
’11, one of three senior biology research
students to use the new microscope. The red
strings are actin filaments—a kind of bungee
This image, taken by Noble with the new microscope,
shows three-dimensional details inside cultured mouse
cells. The red strings are actin filaments, and the spotted
blue ovals are the nuclei within each cell.
28 CONNECTIONS | Summer/Fall 2011 www.naz.edu