A laser phase plate reveals molecules inside living cells

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:19

   kind of building the right portfolio of different modalities of data earlier this year we announced the laser phase plate and it's it's a really exciting project it's decades in the making holger muller at berkeley imagined it you know many decades ago biohub started investing in it years ago. And basically what it is, is it's phase contrast for electron microscopy. And so it's truly high technology. So basically it's the most powerful standing wave laser in the world.

2. 26:49

   So a beam of light, which interferes with the electron beam to shift its phase so that you can have phase contrast in electron microscopy. And so what this really gets you is the ability to look. And so the big application is cryo-electron tomography, which is basically sectioning the cell and really now using electron microscopy to see all the proteins and other macromolecules in situ in their living context. And so the contrast is really critical there because the observations are incredibly, incredibly noisy. And that contrast allows you to start to make out the individual molecules and understand what they are, how they're interacting.

3. 27:37

   And I think it's just going to open up a totally new understanding of kind of the dynamic structural biology of the living cell. So I think this, you know, this gets back to really one of the core principles of Biohub, which is this idea that the idea of the power of kind of new technologies for measurement and observation to change how we understand the world, to change the science that we can do.

4. 28:07

   And so many, so many historic paradigm shifts in science have really come from new technologies for measurement. So I think, you know, biology is just so, you know, they're, they're, they're incredible parallels to other domains where we're, we're developing AI, but there are also things that make biology fundamentally different. And I think the biggest difference is the limits in our ability to observe, see, and measure what matters. And so much of biology has been driven by the development of new tools to do that.

5. 28:49

   And as we have more and more powerful tools that allow us to see more and more of biology, we have the ability to build richer and richer models for it. And so, you know, that's really kind of how we think about this problem is how can we drive up the number of parameters that we can measure in every cell? How can we expand the field of view and the number of cells that we can observe simultaneously?

6. 29:15

   How can we open up the temporal dimension to see cells over time? And how can we open up the molecular dimension to really see what's actually happening inside them down at the most fundamental