Smart microscopes discover ephemeral biology

As a Wallenberg Scholar, Ilaria Testa wants to build a microscope that can reveal and film the rapid processes in the molecular machinery that controls, for example, the brain's synapses. 

When watching a football match or observing a crowd in a large area, we usually move our field of vision quickly to follow an action. But often we can miss what happens suddenly, faster than the speed needed to move our eyes or head, if the area is too large. How many times have you missed a target? This is exactly what happens in the subcellular and nanoscale world when scientists monitor proteins instead of a football.

High-precision microscopes have previously been used to record static screenshots of these important synaptic events. But when trying to monitor a large area such as a whole cell or even a network of interacting cells, the time needed to record a screenshot increases, hampering the ability to record fast dynamics. 

Specialised software

One way to maintain speed is to give up precision. Precision, however, is what is needed to observe the molecular machinery such as proteins and their complexes, which form synapses and give rise to brain activity by interacting closely and switching places. Ilaria Testa and her research team are now aiming to bridge precision and speed and move from high-precision screenshots to movies of synaptic life during activity, or to continue the football analogy - when the player shoots the ball.

The first challenge will be to build a microscope that can handle both high speed and high precision with compatible hardware. For this, specialised software and optical systems will be developed. Data will also need to be processed very quickly and ways of making decisions integrated, that is, through image analysis that detects an action correctly. 

The goal is a completely new microscope that can make decisions and outperform manual microscope users in speed when changing scales, for example, which will provide completely new dynamic data on synaptic life during physiological activity.