THE prospect of filming DNA at work inside living cells has come closer with a technique for capturing images of biomolecules that uses ordinary light.
Researchers at Osaka University in Japan were able to resolve features a few dozen atoms across by combining two existing techniques that beat the diffraction limit of ordinary light microscopes – the principle that you can’t resolve objects smaller than half the wavelength of light. They hope their technique could be fine-tuned to provide a reliable way of imaging individual molecules or structures such as DNA base pairs.
Satoshi Kawata’s team scanned bundles of DNA strands…
